The "RISD blocks"

Ever since I had left RISD pre-college (in 2006) I have questioned my art, but this was not in the good way. It was at my beloved RISD (the school I had once dreamed of attending since the age of 7) where all my effort to perfect realism no longer mattered. It seemed like the people putting in less effort with less skill were doing better conceptually and I was left in the dust, all my years of work worthless.

It wasn't even the skill that they were looking for. I saw into the soul of RISD and all I could see were the people looking for modern or post modern art. I am a student of the old masters and this was no longer the fit I had always dreamed of. It is because of the constant failures (mostly because of my love for realism) that I started to drift into a state of blind determination. I didn't know what they wanted and I lost who I was as an artist.

It is there that a mountain was placed in the way of my creativity. I no longer had my patience and I felt as though what I was doing could only be put on paper if it was perfectly "artistic." I did everything that the book Art and Fear speaks of, and I called it my "RISD block" once I finally found that it was there.

Playing it safe I had lost my passion for the things that I had always wanted to do. I would get so caught up in my mistakes that they would overwhelm me, my paper being worn away with eraser instead of permanent marks. It was at UMass that I started to regain my old ways, but not until last fall.

There have been small clicks here and there since then. I was able to really get excited about my drawings, and that is where I thrived. I guess my lack of depression also helped the matter, but as I have said before the biggest clicks have come over the course of the past few weeks. A mixture between my recent failures and recent successes. I know now the only way I could get out of my "RISD block" was to break so I could build myself back up artistically.