Reflection on My Studies in The Past Semester of Fine Arts at University...

As a developing artist, my perception for art was very limited as I was more into creating art that is of aesthetic appeal. At the start of my first semester of joining this course of fine arts as my bachelors degree at Minerva, I was confused and lost in what I wanted to achieve this semester. Additionally, the freedom I was getting along the way added more confusion into my goals that I wanted to achieve. However, one main goal that I knew I wanted to achieve would be to learn how to create art that could be significantly influential, have a purpose, or change someone’s life. Along with this, I also wanted to create art that could express my ideas in a creative manner. To achieve this, the two main key things that are often a challenge for me to be able to create art would be learning how to be creative and imaginative. With these challenges, I came into Minerva struggling to create artworks out of curiosity, creativity, and inspiration from the society around me.

Despite the amount of freedom I have received throughout the semester, I still feel that I have accomplished a good amount of initial goals that would help me to get into the creative mindset that I hope to achieve. In other words, I have seen a gradual progress in learning how to experiment as that is one challenging process for me. I have always gotten very confused about what experimentation is and how it helps me get into that creative mindset. Nevertheless, the studio support classes, theory, and studio that I have received so far, including unstable tech, drawing, painting, and sculpture/ installation classes, along with a few online videos on experimentation have helped me learn how to think critically and observe the world around me and understand how experimentation can lead to being creative. I started to learn how to come up with ideas by being loose with my techniques and creating art by observing what I see around me. This has helped me enjoy that creative process of creating art and it has helped me to understand that being creative can have its failures and successes. This is also due to the fact that Minerva has allowed me to take the opportunity to experiment with things around me through workshops, the space, and through inspiration from other artists.

Even now, I still struggle to create artworks out of curiosity, creativity, and inspiration around me to a certain extent. I also struggle with battling the idea of perfection which has been and will still be a struggle to conquer each time I experiment. However, the second block has gradually helped me to accept the idea of failure and experiment a bit more.

With this in mind, I hope to achieve more in learning how to experiment and continue to draw or take photos daily to help me dive deeper into being creative and imaginative with what I observe around me. Additionally, I have started to create more ideas naturally which helps me to look forward to seeing what next semester will bring me and help me to dive deeper into the creative mindset. I hope to continue to follow the flow and be open to learning more techniques that would help me get my creativity and imagination back to action.