As I contemplated starting my second year at art college, I realized how much learning new things about art and design had triggered my inquisitiveness in other areas of thought as well.
By this time, my natural curiosity had been energized from a small fire into a full-on blaze, fuelled by waves of new information. I wanted to understand it all. Everything around me seemed to excite my mind, and each little dopamine rush of new ideas brought with it a desire to integrate new ideas with the old stuff that I thought I already understood.
The biggest moments for me were when a new piece of information would challenge or modify old information in some profound way, like how Marcel Duchamp’s painting “Nude descending a staircase” used Cubist abstraction to refer to figure in motion the same way Muybridge’s motion study photographs did, or like the multiple exposure films of Norman McLaren in the 1960s.
Another revelation was seeing how combining frequencies worked with coloured lights: two darker colours projected onto each other always resulted in a brighter combined colour (the essence of additive colour theory). When I finally saw the connection between additive and subtractive colour theories through the methods of the four colour printing process, I was so happy that the seemingly disparate colour models (additive and subtractive) were finally unified conceptually.
(Okay, that all sounds perhaps rather dry or obscure, but I guess that I was so eager to find ways to draw ideas together – to integrate them – that every little resonance between disciplines seemed very significant to me, like I had discovered something new.)
I believed that everything in the world, all the ideas, and all their structures, were ultimately connected. There were answers that would tie things together, I was certain. I was a curious young cat, and in my constantly open and curious state of mind, visual art became a beautiful new lens to peer through and examine my world. It helped me focus and refine my understanding with each new idea. I enjoyed finding interconnections or analogues between different disciplines. I wanted to tie ideas together, to find some underlying or overarching common principle that united seemingly separate ideas. It was like searching for a perfect metaphor to glue concepts or themes together from one area to another.
I guess the integration of ideas, or a pursuit of “the underlying idea” was my deepest goal.
Modern art history lectures brought me awareness of some of the social and political movements that had inspired artistic movements. Political action didn’t motivate me, but I realized that it greatly energized many of my classmates. Any kind of art could use its language to communicate dissatisfaction, or defend those who needed help, or to promote changes to make life better.
Post-war trauma and new developments in psychology had influenced the birth of art movements like Surrealism and Dadaism. Industrial and technological advances continued to impact architecture, visual design, and industrial design. New ideas in physics and philosophy helped artists to push modern art into new forms of abstract and symbolic image-making, like Expressionism or Cubism.
Foundation had been so appealing to me because it had been so wide-ranging and general. But with the end of my Foundation program, my classmates were starting to specialize in particular media, like painting, printmaking, photography, video, or performance. Meanwhile, I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do next.
Specialization seemed like an impossible proposition for me. I really had to think about it…
