I want to make things with yarn. To begin with.
I'm sort of seesawing here, in terms of content. When I left college, it took me a year to even pick up a paintbrush. Part of that was circumstance, part was fear, part was overwhelmedness. Is that a word? It is now. College pulped me up and reformed me, art-wise. It opened my head up to a whole new woooorld of artistic possibility. However, with education comes a loss of spontaneity, innocence, I suppose, ease. The stuff that makes so much outsider art amazing. Not that I would consider myself an outsider artist before I went to Bennington. But I was shockingly ignorant about not only contemporary art, but most art post-impressionism. Any paintings and drawings I did were straight-up portraits or still-lives and I didn't think about the subject matter for a second. And I painted dozens of paintings throughout high school. In college, dumped into an environment of intense introspection and historical connotation and meaning, I didn't paint a single thing in four years that I care to look at now. So the first thing I painted after college (a year after college) was an acrylic painting of Zac Efron. I painted it in a day, on the floor of my den, while watching tv. And it galvanized me. It was so much fun! I haven't stopped producing art since. But at this point, after two years in Los Angeles, on the brink of moving to a strange new city and focusing on art full-time, I'm feeling once again a strange urge to be "meaningful." To think about what I'm painting. To create things that no one understands except me. To make things with yarn.
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Julia Cooper
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