Art History

Vajandrea
Vajandrea
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

I have always been more on the creative side as a person. I always drew pictures from as early as age 3 or 4.

At the end of elementary school my mother enrolled the two of us in a black and white photography course at a nearby community college. I would guess that was in 1983- a time before photography became instantly proliferated by the masses. There was light sensitive film inside the cameras that had to be chemically processed in the dark to make negatives of the images from which to make prints.

Signing us up to learn those skills was such a smart thing for my mom to do because after that my reputation as an amateur photographer and film-processing technician preceded me when I went to high school. The yearbook sponsor asked me to work on the yearbook, which I did all throughout high school.

Immediately following graduation I entered Art College. Unfortunately I did not decide to continue studying photography there although I already had some experience and they had a great program there.

Instead I chose to study structure and surface design. That is weaving fabrics on a loom and anything to do with decorating the surface of fabrics such as batik or silk-screening.

We used images from our sketchbooks when embellishing our fabrics. I had drawn some forms from my imagination of women, head and shoulders, wearing fancy hairdos. My professor saw these and aptly referred to them as my “beauty shop ladies.” He encouraged me to use those motifs in my work.

I did love surface design and I turned out yards and yards of nice work while I was in that program but I guess I probably produced a few yards of woven fabrics on a loom. I definitely preferred the more immediate gratification of surface design to the tedious and time-consuming activity of weaving on a loom.

I also studied printmaking briefly but I didn’t ever like anything I made in there. Printmaking requires you to think in reverse and my mind doesn’t really do that very easily.

Another art form I learned about was paper making. I also made a lot of work in that class. It involves pulling a framed filter through a tub of water filled with some type of natural pulp like cotton. We frequently made paper from old blue jeans.

I did not graduate from that institution. I left in 1993 after being encouraged to do so by 3 professors who said I was not committed to my studies there. After that time I stopped producing works of all these creative forms.

Around 2002 I did do a series of cartoon-like drawings of female characters in a sketchbook but stopped that soon after.

Around 2012 I found myself in possession of construction paper, glue and scissors. I just picked them up and started cutting out the recurrent imagery in my work (ladies wearing crowns, fancy hairdos and dresses) then gluing them onto pieces of construction paper.

Again the muse left me and I did not make more until last year. In November of that I simultaneously picked up where I left off with cut paper collages and created an Instagram account to feature photos of my work. The difference is I stopped using construction paper and started using card stock instead.

In that time I have posted well over 2000 images of new collages on IG. I have seen many other accounts that do not even have a fraction of the number of posts that I do which have hundreds or thousands more followers than my scant 600 (a number that has been stagnantly fluctuating back and forth between 590 and 630 for months). The matter of my followers is quite puzzling. I would have thought after all this time and all these posts I would have easily gained 1000 followers by now. I have probably had and lost that many followers at least once. It feels as if my following is intentionally being kept from growing past 600.

The number of “likes” I get also changes vastly and very frequently. There was one day within the past week or two when I was receiving dozens and dozens of likes for every post I made that day then inexplicably the following day I continued posting images from the same series as the previous day and did not get even 5 likes for any of them. This persisted for days. Then a few days later I posted a pic to see how many likes I would get. It got 20 or 30.

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