Ever since I was a small child I’ve been going to museums.At first I hated them, I mean what kid wants to stand silently looking at art for hours, but now I really appreciate it.
I have favorite artists now, and with research you find the things these artists have gone through.I see pieces of myself in a lot of my favorite artists.
Credit to Twitter
Van Gogh has always been my favorite, his use of colors and textures are like no other and never cease to amaze me. My favorite of his paintings is his self-portrait. You can see so much of his inner turmoil in his china blue eyes.
Credit to Wikipedia
Andy Warhol is amazing.He was so unique in his time.He was an idol during his prime.His art makes you think, its bright colors reel you in and you just can’t stop looking at them.
Don’t get me wrong – education is supposed to be challenging. But more frequently I’ve heard people say “Is he okay?” Following comes the response, “Yeah but he’s all burnt out.”
Burnout is real. It’s a state of chronic stress that can cause lethargy, depression, and general numbness and not a care in the world. (I suggest you read the link given below.)
“Burnout happens when you’ve been experiencing chronic stress for so long that your body and your emotional system have begun to shut down and are operating in survival mode,” says Dr. Sara Denning, a clinical psychologist based in Manhattan who specializes in dealing with stress and anxiety. “You numb out because you can’t think. You can’t even make decisions anymore.”
Further delving into the article reveals that burnout symptoms were arriving in younger and younger people, as early as college freshman. Which is where I will be next year. And it’s also where I feel like I’m heading next year.
There’s something called Senioritis, and it’s, as described as me, “a high school senior lacking in motivation because WE’RE GRADUATING OMYGOSH.” The symptoms are similar to a burnout, lacking motivation, lethargy, etc. The difference is that Senioritis isn’t usually stress or depression caused. It’s just that knowing how I won’t be here next year to deal with consequences makes me want to… Slack off.
I’ve gotten off topic.
Burnout.
If a college freshman is already feeling the symptoms of burnout, then what does that say about the education system? Are we supposedto be holding these children over a fire with a stick? Maybe. But are we then supposed to let them slow roast until a perfect, golden brown –
– or let them catch on fire and watch them try and quench themselves?
Graphic image aside… There goes my two cents. And I don’t care enough to get them back either.
The soft pangs of the notes filled the air, swirling up from the grand piano all the way around the curving stairs and straight to the top of the high ceiling of the hallway. The girl sitting on the black leather bench had wispy blonde hair, her feet dangling far above the pedals.
She shared the small seat with her mother, a woman appearing to be in her forties. She had short dark brown hair, and her makeup was applied deliberately, giving her face a slight orange tint. As she pointed to certain keys and moved her child’s small wrists up higher, her brow creased and defined the onset wrinkles there.
They were an offsetting pair – the small girl’s fragility was evident next to the woman’s full frame. It was almost as though their appearance conveyed the unsung words of their relationship; the dominance of the woman over the powerless child. And as the small blonde girl clinked away at the keys, her small fingers were barely able to reach the far black rectangles, and so the woman pulled her hands further apart, stretching the little pads of her pointer fingers further than they could go, mounting a tremendous tension of tingling sparks in the girl’s tiny fingernails, ready and itching to explode.
Parts of the following blog are fictional accounts.
Tuesday
I’m always the first one back from breakfast, so the dorms are quiet and still. Halfway down the hallway, a drawing of a cartoon spider flutters to my feet from it’s position on the wall. It was an omen, I swear it was. There was a spider in the dorm’s cutlery drawer when I was looking for spoon to make hot chocolate with.
The girls went to bed that night feeling weary but quite hopeless. We all knew that the relentless torture would not ease up yet. “Third time’s the charm,” they say.
3am and the all-too familiar sound fills the dorm. I laid awake in bed for 20 seconds or so, contemplating just staying in my room and facing the consequences.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with that thought, as I was the first person out of the dorm. The other humans took their time coming out because they knew that there was no fire and no danger.
We’re all tired. We’re all bickering.
Wednesday
No sign of our 8-legged friends anywhere, so I felt internally relieved. The other girls felt hopelessly exhausted and didn’t have as much knowledge as I do.
All was quiet that night. Not a peep, not a ring, not a twitch.
Thursday
6:40am and I’m brushing my teeth, eyes still closed and dozing off in the silence. A friend screams and points to the wall – a large brown recluse, crouching and staring at me from the mirror. I bring him outside and try to calm my beating heart, now definitely awake.
There’s the cartoon spider at my feet again. I had stuck it back onto the wall on Tuesday, and today… Well, there it is.
9pm Thursday. I’m prepared for their final attack.
Friday
5am and I was woken by the smell of smoke. It was faint enough that the fire alarms didn’t go off.
There were about (aw heck no) a dozen spiders on my floor.
They all ran under the crack of my door and I followed them out into the hallway and out of the dorm. It was hot outside. Like, fiery hot. Actually, there was a huuuge fire outside the dorm that singed the edges of my tie-dye shirt and curled the ends of my braided hair.
The fire alarm finally went off but the dorm didn’t jump like it usually did.
Everyone was sick of the fire alarm. Every single one of them stayed in their beds and covered their ears and groaned. Nobody was awake enough to smell the smoke or to even bother to check the hallways, where smoke was coating the ceilings.
The dorm dogs ran outside silently, followed by a cat and several hundred more insects of all shapes and sizes.
I thought I was dreaming, which is why I only laughed and waved at the dorm.
My right hand raises, slowly, until it is pointed directly at the sun, extended toward the heavens and the stars above.
My left is drawn across my face, deliberately blocking my view of the earth surrounding me. Silhouettes dancing over vast, open plains are shut out, blocked from sight, from sound.
Slowly my feet move forward, step by step, moving toward an unknown location. I have lost all physical senses – I cannot tell where I am.
Controlled by a puppeteer, I have no power over my movements. There are strings attached to my every joint so that each microscopic movement is mastered. Over time, every motion becomes second nature, and the puppeteer has succeeded.
The conductor of conscience, and courier of communication, the puppeteer invests hours of time, meticulously perfecting its puppet. The strings bind them together, and until they are cut, the puppet moves as it is controlled – each and every motion, forever and ever.
This is my fourth year at Ojai Valley School, and I’ve taken an art class every year here. My freshman year I took Photography, and my sophomore and junior years I took Ceramics and Ceramics II. My senior year, this year, I recall signing up for a drawing class.
Never would I imagine that I would be put into AP Studio Art.
Yes, I may have had three years of art, but none of those three art classes involved hand-drawing anything. Now, in AP Art, we have to produce 24 art pieces to be put into our portfolio, which is a staple if you want to get into art school.
Which is not where I want to go. But I took it as a challenge and went with it anyways.
12 of the pieces are our Concentration, which is “a body of related works that demonstrate sustained and thoughtful investigation of a specific visual idea.” Basically 12 pieces of art related to one topic, such as drawing a 12-piece short comic.
12 of the pieces are our Breadth, “a variety of works demonstrating a range of conceptual and/or technical approaches.”
There’s more than just drawing with pencil and paper. There’s black charcoal, white charcoal, oil painting, oil pastels, color pencils, watercolor painting, things like that, and our Breadth section is basically us showing off what we can do in as many different ways as we can. (My favorite so far is white charcoal on black paper.)
Apart from “art” classes in elementary school, I’ve never taken art before, so since the beginning of the year, every time I sat down in our art studio, my first thought was always “I have no idea what I am doing.” To be honest, I still don’t know what I’m doing.
But that’s alright, I guess. Most of us don’t know what we’re doing there anyways.
OVS Journalism Blog 