Lateralization - an artistic experiment

     My first year at EMU studying art I wanted to just work outside of my comfort zone.  My goal was to try new things with art, ignore artistic insecurities, and realize that if a piece is making me uncomfortable or stressed, its probably a good idea to keep working on it.  This goal became really important during my last assignment of my drawing 2 foundations course, the final exam.  Our final was a non-representational piece; it needed no form or subject, just experimentation documented artistically. It was simply, "Make a mark, and push it to the limit".
      Now there were many ways my classmates went about doing this, from eating berries and spitting them on a canvas for 3 weeks,  to sitting in the building's restroom covering their nipples with paint and stamping them hundreds of times, to covering an empty studio upstairs with paper and dipping a yoyo in paint just to play with it for a few hours.
     I felt all those things were a bit too overcomplicated for my tastes, I wanted to make something complex with something simple, or at least that is what I got out of the point of the assignment.  I also wanted to stay true to my goal of working out of my comfort zone, and I wanted to do something giant.  With those goals in mind Lateralization just kind of came to be.  After a week thumbnailing, planning, measuring, testing patterns, testing compositions, testing sizes, testing the muscular endurance of my non-dominant right hand, my final plan finally came together.  I wanted to take a risk, and I figured what is more risky than doing your final exam in your college drawing class with the hand you have no idea how to write with.
    Before starting this experimental project, I made myself some rules. First, I would not be allowed to fix any mistake in the pattern, start over, go back or change things. Second, once I started a panel, I had to stick to only that panel until it was done. Third, I had to use the same cheap, $0.20 ball point pens (which I ended up using over 20 in the end). Fourth, I had to make it giant -- no giving up halfway and cropping it down.  If I was going to do this it would only work if I did it big. Fifth, no cheating.  I set these rules up and followed them so the art project would be a true experiment and a proper representation of what I wanted to show.
     In the end I got my A, although I was pretty nervous going into the critique. After all, drawing lines over and over isnt nearly as radical as nipple-stamping,  but the one thing I knew i had on my classmates was difficulty of process (who honestly wants to use their bad writing hand that much?) and time put into it, I put in three times the work hours anyone else did. I think my final product was immense enough to draw attention from afar, intricate and detailed enough to draw people close, and experimental and scientific enough to make it stand out for this assignment.  I have never learned more about risk taking, experimentation, pushing yourself through frustrating work, and concept in any other assignment, and I left that class feeling much more equipped.  Over 20 shitty ball point pens, over 120 hours of monotonous and carpel-tunnel inducing work (that I brought upon myself), and about  a million questions of "what are you doing and why are you drawing that many lines over and over" from all my non artistic friends all came together to teach me a lot and make me really happy to be studying art.

Oh yea and I got asked to place it in a gallery in Ann Arbor. My first ever piece to be held to such an honor.  Here's their website link.

7.5 Feet Tall!

artist statement:

My work is 1980 sq. inches of pattern created using both of my hands and ballpoint pens that documents the way each side of my brain works as well as investigates the relationships between pattern, texture, and negative space.

I wanted to push a simple medium and process to the limit to find complex results while simultaneously forcing myself to work outside of my comfort zone.

Using ballpoint pens and simple patterns like the alphabet or vertical lines repeated over large scales I completed my first goal, and by forcing myself to complete the right-half the piece with my non-dominant right hand I vanquished any confidence and control I had in the outcome.

Through hours of monotonous repeated patterns, experimentation with relationships of negative space, and attempting to mirror my right-brain’s work with my left-brain I made some surprising discoveries; Work with my non-dominant right hand would be more horizontally linear due to increased concentration, tension, and slower work methods, and work with my left would be more skewed horizontally due to the absence of concentration required when using your dominant hand.

An obsessive and rhythmic relationship with the patterns creates a visual diagram explaining the way each side of my brain handles measured and excessive tasks.