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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Few people understand the need for yarn as much as I do. After months of painting and hating it, drawing and throwing the pages away in a huff, doodling on Post-Its and never finding the right flow, I started crocheting. With a vengeance. It started with hats and scarves and other safe stuff but now I have a sweater going and other bizarre clothing in the filing cabinet in my brain. Somehow the tactile feeling of creating something fuzzy and weird is a beautiful break from paint-on-surface. I say, go nuts! Stick yarn to canvas! Crochet spiderwebs! Knit monster hats! Creation is creation, no matter what the medium, and art is borne of moving fingers. Can't wait to see what your madness makes. :D
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Julia Cooper
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