The elusive "a-ha" moment

On Monday we had a peer critique in Nagel; as a class, a lot of us wanted to get feedback in a casual manner regarding our process, thoughts on the research we all did, and where we saw our projects going.

Even though I had conceptualized my current painting series a while ago, after doing my own research and thinking about how it would best represent my vision articulated through practicum, I was beginning to re-evaluate.

My main issue is that my artistic path is most definitely not a straight and narrow road. It's been full of hills, bumps, twists, and turns. More of an obstacle course, really.

One of the biggest struggles I've had is really developing my written vision and having my visual work be representative of that. I often have trouble articulating my thought process behind my work mostly because it can be very multi-faceted. Pulling from the marketing world, fine art background, and fashion interests, a lot of my issues lie in reconciling all three and figuring out not only how they relate to each other but what that relationship means to me and what I have to say regarding it.

After my individual critique with Chinn and research paper, I realized that the themes of idealized beauty, femininity, usage of the body, degradation of advertising, and aesthetic interest in design were all but smaller facets of an over-arching concept: the role of fashion in the art world. Fashion and art definitely play off of and inform each other, but the conversation of whether fashion can be considered a fine art has been an ongoing conversation as I discussed in my previous blog post.

My contribution to this conversation is my opinion, plain and simply put: Fashion is Art. They are one and the same, and should be recognized as such. In turn, my art should be about elevating fashion to the level of fine art.

The reason this post is called "a-ha" moment, is because that is exactly what I had during our peer critique on Monday night. When I was explaining how I had lost how these paintings related to what I found to be the truth of my work, I was asked what I thought about fashion versus art, and I stated that I thought fashion IS art. With that said, Tanner contributed that I should incorporate fabric into my work. If fashion is art, why not make fashion the focus?

With that I realized I had been frustrated because I had been approaching my work from the art angle instead of fashion. Painting something with elements of fashion is still a "fine art" painting with fashion influence. Using fabric as a canvas, or more heavily and physically using fashion as the foundation of my work I can use paint to bring it into the realm of "fine art".

A-ha.