Self-Assessment (bonnie)

Increasingly, I am finding that my greatest strengths are also my greatest weaknesses, so it is hard for me to separate these two things. The following two strengths//weaknesses are important ones that have largely driven my life—how I am and how I act—though for a long time I did not realize them so clearly, and don’t fully understand them still.

Strength: Ritual//Spontaneity//Reflection

I have a tendency to be forgetful, spacey, and caught up in whatever I’m doing at the moment. To counter this, I have learned to plan, to use routine as a way to structure my life. When I plan and I stick to that plan I can get a lot done, and I can be responsible to myself and to others. However, I have learned to plan “so well” that more often than not, I over-plan. I get stuck in a rut of what I “must” do. I sometimes have trouble letting go enough to see what it is that I am doing and how I could be going about things differently.

I have found that I need to create reflective space in my life so that I’m not hemmed in to one sort of thinking or making and can consider what I’m doing. With reflective space, I can clearly see the paintings I’m painting, the writings I’m writing, and imagine other possibilities that I’ve not considered. With reflective space I can open my process back up when it is too closed or ritualized or close it off when it has become to open and spontaneous.

Weakness: Expectations//Trust//Patience//Frustration//Forgiving//Unforgiving

I am very patient and enduring person. I can stand a lot of hurt or annoyance or disappointment. From others I expect little more than respect, kindness, and engagement or a willingness to try. I trust people very easily and only when it’s clear that kindness is lacking do I flip over, unable to be patient anymore, and get frustrated and sometimes hurt. Usually, though this fades pretty quickly, as I can usually see the other person’s point of view and as I forgive others easily.

My weakness is that I have less patience for myself than for other people, by far. While it usually takes me a long time to get frustrated with or hurt by others, I get frustrated with myself quickly and easily. In short, I expect too much of myself—that I’ll get things faster than I do, that I’ll do more than I possibly can, and so on. I have trouble finding acceptance for myself; I am hard and unforgiving towards myself. I look at my work in this way, too, because I see it as part of myself, a reflection of who I am. This means that when I see something that I don’t like associated with myself in my work, I run from that and try to make it go away. I notice that I do this when I am bothered, afraid, scared, worried, or concerned about something. This practice of running away makes it very difficult to continue making work with much continuity. Recently I realized that I can let go of all the “goods” and “bads” to which I hold myself, and perhaps more importantly, I came to an effective way of doing it, but I am not very well practiced at this yet.

Future:

What’s next for me right now is painting more. Because I don’t have a lot of experience painting, I need to play, to do some constructive experiments where I try different painting techniques just to see what happens. Right now, I want to experiment with layering colors and I want to try painting larger. I am interested in color fields, in landscape painting (more or less), and in gestural mark-making, and I need to paint more to see where I want to take my work next.

Specifically this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m painting as well as how I’m getting there. I have been interested in air, atmosphere, and in-between spaces, where things meet. I still feel overwhelmed at not knowing what to paint because there are so many places where things meet—earth and sky at the horizon, water and earth at the riverside, tree against sky above the horizon, and so on.

How I want to paint is something that I have been questioning for a while, but especially since our last critique. My first watercolor drawings were abstractions derived from my experiences, but not drawn while looking at anything. My paintings on wood were the exact opposite of that—they are images that I held down, first by a camera, then carefully translated into paintings to so that the paintings are near replicas of those photographs. At the end of the semester I didn’t want to continue doing either one of those processes as I had been doing them before. I didn’t want to be only drawing from my head because I enjoy the engagement of looking as I draw. I also didn’t want to be painting only from photographs because they are so much about holding onto a passed experience and I am interested in a presentness of experience, a sensed and lived now. Reading about phenomenology only strengthened that interest. So how do I choose to paint my paintings? Do I paint from life? From my head? From both? Right now I have decided to try both options, to paint from life and abstractions, and perhaps forget these categories altogether. I will see what comes of it in time. The essential thing is to paint.