wild swans

Motivation

Today in class we watched a beautiful film called Ashes and Snow (the website doesn’t do the film justice, although you can get an idea of its imagery). The film was quiet and crisp, with images such as children sleeping with elephants, and a man swimming underwater holding onto the tusks of an elephant. It was overlaid with sometimes cliche but still very personal speech. And my teacher talked about how people are drawn to and respect an artist’s work because they trust his struggle. 

It’s something I could do easily before with drawing and video but that I find difficult to do now: the necessity of taking risks with your work, putting your own emotions into it and finding a way to make it reflect your own struggles. Before, I believed that if I could make work that reflects something horrible inside, others would relate to it and feel less horrible themselves, and the human race would be slightly more connected, so to speak. Now I think it’s unrealistic that the average artist can create work that will truly move other people, even if it is a personal reflection of who he or she is (this task is more commonly left to filmmakers, authors, singers, and songwriters), and of course it hurts when a personal project is poorly received by others. So I started this thesis as a logical conclusion of an interest in fairy tales, a desire to improve my Flash animation skills, a place to push my Actionscript skills, and never thought of it as art. And now I wonder if I can somehow change this before I’ve wasted eight months on a project neither I nor others really care about.