Sol Lewitt's #25

"The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others."

 Sol Lewitt derived 35 sentences, many consider it manifestos to Conceptual Art.  Sentence number 25 rang particularly true to me.  Often, when I finish a piece, and asked to explain, or talk about it, I usually just draw blanks in my head, and just say "I don't know, it just kinda... happened."  I don't really understand what I do in my work, in terms of what it looks like in the end result, but I usually am able to give a detailed step-by-step talk of the process of my piece.  I know that my art usually starts with an idea, a theme, a concept, and techniques or media I want to practice with or try out.  From there, I run with it, so to speak.

An recent occasion I can remember of this instance was in a Intro to Textiles course I took over the summer, here at State.  We had just done our final project, a surface design piece on a yard x yard piece of cotton, using all the techniques we had used.  On the last day of class, we did a cumulative critique and displayed all our pieces.  With my surface design piece, I dyed the cotton a teal blue, then made a swirly-patterned stamp and discharged the fabric with it, repeating the stamp in neat rows.  After that, I silk-screened a candle-bra/chandelier silhouette with a metallic dark purple textile paint, and on top I used a fork to make small dots for a pearled-string with gold and silver metallic textile paint.   I had to explain what it was about, what I had in mind when making the piece was that I wanted to use my stamp, and when seeing the swirls, I wanted to make it something elegant, so hence the candle-bra.  When I think of something elegant, an image of a candle-bra comes up.  As for the color pallet, when discharging the teal, it make a purple color, and I really liked the way the teal and purple look together, so I made the candle-bras purple.  When I was finished with it, I was trying to think of kinds of things that the design can be used for, and I thought of maybe a wallpaper, or upholstery.  One of my classmates, read more deeply into my piece and commented how he liked how the placement of a candle-bra, an item that is placed hanging on a ceiling, has been displaced and placed on a wall.  Or as an upholstery, the juxtaposing of two, or three different elements of a room placed together on a single room item.

My classmates view on the piece was better than mine, as I did not have any view on it at all.  And at the same time, my view, as the artist, on the piece would be no better than his.