An
artist’s preferred style of art evolves throughout her life for a few possible
reasons, two of which being:
1. As she gains life experience she
will mature, and the progression of her maturity will be reflected in her work.
2. As her relationship with the
world around her evolves, she will inevitably develop new perspectives, and
will discover new concepts and ideas she wants her artwork to communicate.
Through
what I’ve read and written this year, I’ve learned a lot about myself and my
relationship with the world around me.
Toward the beginning of the year, I
valued individualism very highly. While
reading “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin, I realized just
how important I found being a nonconformist.
This was reflected in many aspects of my life-- my clothing, my
countenance, my music of choice, my artwork. . . It was especially reflected in my
writing. In my “The Ones Who Walk Away
From Omelas Essay”, I argued that “What Le Guin is encouraging us to do is to
stop contributing to the selfish and cruel nature of our communities” (“The
Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Essay” 2).
I venerated the ones who walk away as representing “those of us who
question authority and are not willing to comply with a community's norms if we
find them immoral” (2). The story of the
ones who walk away made me realize how much I value being an individual, and I
began to take pride in setting myself apart from the rest of the world. Much of what I valued, I still believe to be
important. However, by the time I wrote
my “Irony” blogpost, I was beginning to realize that “humans have a tendency to
go to extreme lengths” (Irony 1). My
relationship with the world had become pretty one-sided-- it was just me trying
to communicate what an independent individual I was. I wasn’t listening to the rest of the world
and learning from it.
Fortunately, while reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, I began to see
the error in my ways. I realized that
Okonkwo is a lot like me: individualistic and stubborn. While writing about Things Fall Apart, I began to notice just how different Okonkwo is
from the rest of the Ibo people. For one
thing, “he doesn’t care much for words because ‘he [has] a slight stammer’
(Achebe 4) and therefore uses violence instead of language to convey his
feelings. . . However, Achebe makes it clear that not everyone in the
village is like Okonkwo. Achebe writes that ‘Among the Ibo
people the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the
palm-oil with which words are eaten’ (Achebe 7)” (“The Lion Project Essay” 1). This is only one example of how different he
is. He is also more rash than the rest
of the people, more violent, more disrespectful—not to mention he ends up
hanging himself. “If only he’d
listened,” I’d find myself thinking. “If
only he’d tried to understand others.” I
realized just how similar we were. I
didn’t want to be like that. These texts
made me realize that I wanted to be able to connect with my community and learn
from the world around me.
