Art III 2024: End of Year Reflection Essay

During my time this year in Art III at Maggie Walker, I feel like I have learned to appreciate a lot more mediums. In this year, I think the activities that had the biggest impact on me were learning more about value, figure drawing, assemblage, and especially learning about true and full utilization color. As I can remember based on my Art Skill Inventory, I almost always strictly used pencil on paper, and hated coloring because I felt it would ‘ruin’ any work I added it to, instead attempting to use nonsensical shading techniques to simulate shadow and highlights. However, this year especially, my greatest improvement I feel has been in the realm of color. I think, especially after our still life painting project, I am much more comfortable utilizing colors in my work, especially now that I understand it thanks to our work with color theory and understanding things like simultaneous contrast. Alongside learning a lot more about color, I think another of the most important lessons I learned in this year of art was the appreciation for other mediums, greatly expanding my perspective on art as a whole. I believe that categorizing myself as someone who was just good at pencil on paper was a bad move, and prevented me from exploring all of the different art techniques, and I’m glad this year fixed this tendency.

In terms of where I still want to improve, I mainly would like to focus on the craft and refinement aspect of my work, and that will come with much more practice. I like the style of messy, chaotic strokes in my work, and although I do feel like it adds some personality to whatever I’m making, I think I should have the option to make more delicate, deliberate, and detailed art. I feel like, in order to make my art look ‘better’ I resorted to covering any imperfections up by developing a messy ‘style’, which, while sometimes effective, I think should be shelved in order to better my ability to make complex and refined work. Therefore, I think in the future I will attempt to push back on this and instead focus on having as good as possible craft in the creation, and then after I have mastered that go back to attempting to stylize my work, which in the end I think will make it look much better.

In order to use what I’ve learned as I move forwards towards next year, I am going to make more attempts to improve the detail in my work. I think some of my current reluctance to do this is a result of me being impatient meticulously and slowly putting in the hours to get something done, but I think consistent practice will aid this greatly, and help me better appreciate the time spent in creating a piece of work. In terms of subject for my summer work, I would like to do more landscapes, especially with buildings and other more detailed aspects, and through the creation of these I will attempt to practice detail and craftsmanship. Using my new understanding of color, I would also like to integrate color into this work, especially since I never attempted to put color into my work before our oil painting and color theory units. By working on this, I hope to improve my craftsmanship for creating art, and if I enjoy making these landscapes I will probably consider it as something I will make independently in Art IV.