My mom recently created a book of photos of my artwork throughout the years. She wanted to compile everything together to give to my dad for a Father’s Day present. I began looking at everything, all my work since I was about 5 years old. Some of the work was produced from photographs so it couldn’t really say anything about the piece (although I guess you could say there might have been a reason behind why I chose the photograph to draw from).
I remembered most of the stuff I had done in the last few years, so I didn’t really feel any differently about them than I had about my earlier work—when I was about 5 or so. Of course, the mind of a 5 year old child may not be sophisticated enough to thoughtfully consider what they want to go onto the piece of paper. But I still thought it would be interesting to look at my work from that time and see if I could try to understand anything from it. And it was fascinating to see how 13 years later I was coming up with explanations for certain things in my drawings that I undoubtedly hadn’t intended to be there—I was purposefully “overanalyzing” the work to see what would come of it.
And that go me to thinking…
Looking at your own work so many years later results in (at least in my case) a different perspective of the work. A perspective that might not parallel what you had intended so many years ago. But it still offers something extraordinary to the viewer. It allows you to look at yourself in a different light and maybe notice something about yourself that you hadn’t noticed before.
And if that’s the case, what can be said for people looking at the art of someone they have never met. They’ll be thinking critically about a work that was created by someone they know nothing about. So their analysis of the work might be so completely different than why the artist had intended. But…does that matter?
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