2.) Reflect on your personal aesthetics. What are the sources or influences on your own aesthetic thought? What are the cognitive and affective strategies that you personally use to understand a work of music, art, or performance at the deepest possible level? How do you make meaning by aesthetically engaging a work of art, music, or performance? Cite specific examples that provide clear evidence for your statements.
Stimulated and inspired by my cohort’s sharing their artwork, I have a mind swimming with Ideas and a clarity of how I need to go home and pull out and photograph all of my work past and present. Presently most of the work, really near 100% is the daily drawing I do for my elementary school art students.
However, I love I come by “making” honestly since both of my parents were makers. My dad with wood, through furniture making, and my mother through her painting of objects, primarily antiques. They were recyclers, re-makers, returners-to-usefulness-artisans. There was not a strict division of art nor craft—they just worked with care on anything that was their current project. There was a great appreciation for the finely crafted object, of wood, basketry, painted furniture, glass, painted metal, ceramic…whatever material, a deep appreciation for the care and patience obvious within the created thing.
