BREAKING VIOLINS IS FUN

I hate rules.
I hate uniformity and conformity and the fact that so many people believe that there is just a ‘wrong’ and a ‘right’ way to do things. I started playing the violin when I was four, and hated it with a passion from the moment I started. According to my teachers there was only ONE way to play correctly and I needed to perfect the art of mimesis. Even as a young and relatively obedient child, I thought that this was utter crap, and that I shouldn’t have to just regurgitate the bars of music in a dull and unoriginal manner. I wanted to dance with the violin, screech behind the bridge, and whack the belly to create a unique cacophony of sound. I hated how all of the Suzuki books had the same boring design on the cover of whirlie circles, and how all of the songs were the same as what everyone else played. My older sister played the violin and thrived on it, so my parents thought that I would as well. They bribed and cajoled me into practicing, giving me a doll if I could memorize a whole piece, a marshmallow for every bar I played correctly, and stickers for not throwing a temper tantrum. The only part I remember enjoying about the violin was making the most hideous sounds possible and breaking it.
Yes, I took that tiny childlike violin and leaned with all my weight on it, mesmerized as the fingerboard slowly cracked and the bridge snapped in half, a piece flying under the nearby table. Caught up in the destructive moment, I threw the violin against the wall and watched as it shattered into splintering pieces all over the carpet, making the whole scene look like a decimated village seen from far above. Now THAT was interesting to me; the jagged forms precisely summed up my antagonism to practicing. The act of breaking it was almost cathartic in retrospect, for after that day I was quite clear, even for a 6 year old, as to exactly how much I despised the violin. Breaking that violin was so liberating that I just had to add a little more oomph to that act, an encore to announce that it wasn’t a mistake or just an act of rebellion, but that I abhorred playing violin, so I broke not one, but two bows. Breaking the rules (and the instrument and accompanying parts) worked, because my parents finally let me quit.
My parents enrolled me in weaving, painting, ceramics, and sculpture classes through the local art center in an attempt to keep my life enriched with the arts, something that they apparently succeeded. I found that there was no right or wrong way to draw something, that experimentation and doing things the ‘wrong’ way was actually in many people’s eyes the ‘right’ way. Even within the more constructed disciplines, I saw technique not as a limitation or a rule, but as a tool to help me achieve my greater goal of expressing my concept. My life as a youngster was filled with artsy endeavors (I can’t really call myself an artist at the age of 10; I was no child prodigy) for fun, to distract myself from the atrocity of school. I dropped out of junior high twice, and although I wasn’t a rebellious teen with run-ins with the law, I was thoroughly fucked up in the head. Art was what helped me mature, to have a vent for all the teenage angst and raw pain that was constantly filling up my being. Art at that point was cathartic, personal, and for the sake of release, rather than creation within the realm of being an artist. Now I am an artist (or becoming one? I’m not quite sure) because it is the only way I can see my life. A lot of the work that I do is utter crap, just more visual noise. Occasionally, however, I create something that touches someone, which makes them understand something on a level that only art can.
It wasn’t until I came to college that my specific interest and a purpose to my art developed. My love for painting and its ability to ignore the physicality of real life drew me in immediately, and now most of my work is abstract and figurative. After a year of focusing my efforts on painting, I became drawn to digital photography partly because I learned to appreciate music and eventually love it in a way that intrinsically tied into visual arts. Music to me is uniquely artistic because it is creating a moment in time using time, and is amazing because a live performance (unless it is taped) will never occur in the exact same way ever again. Painting creates and captures a moment of time while photography selectively freezes an existing millisecond of time and lets it live on through eternity, and something insignificant becomes meaningful just through the choice to recreate it or capture it. This to me made my work more grounded and the content more available to the viewer. I began to explore street photography, and the process of charging a photo with narrative in a subtle and yet meaningful manner. My love of photography traces back to the first camera that my parents gave me around the time that I quit cello. It was a small red and blue rattly plastic point and shoot, but I loved it. I took pictures of everything, transfixed by the ability to compress anything onto a three by five piece of glossy paper. My focus and intent with photography has morphed over the years, but that feeling of peace and release when shooting hasn’t changed.
I suppose my art is a bit self-centered, for most of it deals with my own issues, insecurities, and events in my life. I try to make it ambiguous (but sometimes fail and make it atrociously vague- how dare an artist make vague work- oh the horror of it!) enough as to appeal to a wider audience, for a viewer to be able to find an element that they can identify with and walk away with a slightly different understanding of life. This purpose of my art to me is hugely different than it was a few years ago, when the purpose of my art was to shock, to hit the viewer over the head and acknowledge my teenage angst and rebellion. Now (at my mature and ripe age of 20-ha) I see that breaking of rules and doing things the wrong way just for the sake of itself is obnoxious and accomplishes nothing. Teenage angst and rebellion gets old after a few years, and is quite repetitive in its lack of originality. Visual art reveals what a viewer would not otherwise see, and has the ability to capture an element of emotion and life (conversely death) that connects the viewer and artist and opens up their consciousness.
I don’t even know how much I should reveal about myself, or about my motivation in making a lot of my art. Part of what I think makes some of my work interesting is that the meaning is ambiguous, my motivation for making it is a mystery, and that combination keeps the viewer’s gaze longer than if they knew all the answers. To me, the beauty of art is that it doesn’t readily present clear-cut black and white answers and easy resolutions, but instead probes the viewer to look more carefully at the issue or emotion and begin to be able to make their own personal opinion with the assistance of the art. If a viewer knows all of the artist’s motivations and understands clearly and articulately their stance and development from an incident to a specific piece of art then all of the ambiguity and probing of the viewer is lost. The art can still be ‘good’ (what defines good anyway—something with a complicated and deep conceptual basis or perhaps it is visually stimulating or maybe its just something that can stir the viewer in some manner) and can still evoke some response in the viewer, but it is not on the same level of lifting up the viewer to a new consciousness.
Graphic and web design doesn’t fit perfectly into the matrix created by my photography and oil painting, but instead I consider it an addendum. Graphic design takes everything else I do and compresses it into a more consumable product which many times is unfortunately also, constrained by the aesthetic and business needs of the client (I never did play well with others or really learn the beauty of compromise). I guess that I can justify my love for graphic design through the way that it is adding beauty and in short a pleasurable experience for the eye. The amount of advertising, logo design, magazine layout, product design, et cetera that we imbibe every day is overwhelming, and most of it is stupid and ugly. I guess that I am aiming to improve that, to give people something beautiful to look at that is part of their life and not set apart into the ‘art category’. In this way it is more accessible for people to consume art, and as like most artists, I want everyone to see my art. Art and creativity pervades almost every aspect of our life, and it is the goal of the artist to create something that accomplishes something, that moves a viewer, makes a space more beautiful, raises awareness, challenges the norms, or provides a cathartic release.
Breaking that violin was the first piece of art I created that accomplished something. This allowed me to make a statement and break away from convention. As an artist, I am always curious as to how my art affects the viewer, that is, if it makes any sort of impact on their self. For such a pivotal moment in my life, I had never gotten any feedback on my first ‘performance’ art, so I asked my mother what her reaction at the time had been (six year old memories aren’t always the most reliable accounts!). According to her recollection of events, I had leaned on the violin when putting it away (after a very uneventful hour of practicing for once!) and it just cracked a little, and was later fixed. However, she said that the bows that I broke were definitely cracked because of my hatred for practicing. She said that I would start throwing a temper tantrum, and then at the climax of screaming, whip my bow around until it whacked on the edge of the music stand, splintering the narrow rod of wood.
All this time, I had based my induction into the arts on that rebellious act of purposefully breaking the violin. Does that negate my whole development as an artist? Art to me is like a love affair - it doesn’t matter how I found it - but what happened afterwards. I can’t imagine existing without the cathartic release that art gives me, and the purpose and drive I have because of an almost primal need to create and express myself through visual art. Being an artist is integrated into every part of my life, and it is the one thing that wakes me and puts me to sleep. Sometimes at 2 am I will be lying in bed, trying to sleep, and an inexplicable urge will come over me to paint, to make something that describes a fleeting emotion or thought. If I couldn’t express that, and channel my creativity into something tangible and lasting, I feel like that I would start spinning and screaming. I wouldn’t be able to stop until I passed out from the sheer pain of not being able to let something out by flinging it onto the canvas, a tangible realization of life that nothing but art can bring out.