Dinosaurs & Alien Heads

One of my friends when I was younger used to be so scared of this Jester-toy that hung in my closet. Jesters weren’t scary to me. What was frightening to me was our basement filled with buckets of entrails and monster feet and Godzilla’s eyes staring out of the dark corners of the often-flooded cellar basement. What was scary to me were the alien heads that would suddenly be living in our wooden armoire that also was home to our television or the Velociraptor that was frozen running in place on the top shelf of our cabinet. But at the same time, these things were not unexpected to me. When I was more of a child than I am today, I didn’t realize that my life wasn’t completely normal. After all, kids don’t think about those kinds of things, and when they do, the last thing they want to think is that there’s something wrong with them. Not that there was anything wrong with my childhood in the slightest. I grew up in a world where there were no limits, imagination was a reality and creativity was life. Only when I got a little older, did my friends’ shocked faces upon entering out home or opening a cupboard clue me into the fact that my life was unusual.

Around this time, I also realized that no one in my immediate family (apart from my Uncle Larry who became a banker) has ever had a traditional, or rather, non-creative vocation. My dad created both two & three-dimensional characters for films (hence all of the characters scattered about our home) and my mom had always been a painter. My grandma still sells her homemade clothing to this day and my brother became a storyboard artist. No one seemed to doubt that I would eventually find myself enthralled with everything creative and wake up to realize I was an artist. And after a roundabout way of coming to understand this about myself, that’s exactly what did happen. But of course there were several stages of rebellion in my journey. Part of what was frustrating to me was the fact that everyone in my family and everyone around me was creative. It was intimidating to be a young girl surrounded by artists when I wanted to become one. Even now it is difficult to talk about myself as a child because it was so hard to find a unique creative identity at that age while constantly being bombarded by art in all forms. It seems silly thinking back, but honestly, I was just scared.

To make matters worse, everyone was so supportive of me! So to suppress my instinct to indulge myself in artistic pursuits, I decided when I was eight years old that art just wasn’t going to be my thing. Since I was by nature a good child (I got good grades in school and was always well behaved), I guess this was my form of an uprising against my family of artists and craftsmen. I decided that I wanted to be a scientist and ended up concentrating the most on wanting to be a Marine Biologist. In some ways, I, yet again, owed my parents for this idea because apart from art being emphasized as one of the most important facets of life, nature (and in particular, the ocean) was emphasized as another. A few years later I went to a birthday party that featured a palm reader, who told me that I would most likely grow up to be a Sociologist. At the time, I was really into these sorts of things (astrology, tarot, palm reading) and so of course I had committed the idea of me becoming a sociologist to memory before the words had even finished coming out of this woman’s mouth. These phases went on for a few years until it came time for me to apply to colleges.

With my future being forced upon me I realized that I actually did not want to spend the rest of my life counting plankton samples or charting red algae growth and that I didn’t even really know what sociology meant. Fortunately, I hadn’t successfully evaded the art world throughout my teenage years, so jumping back into it was no trouble at all. I had even been called Best Artist in my eighth grade yearbook, despite my efforts to insist that I hated art. As electives, I had continued to take art courses all through high school and during my senior year I really got back into creating art and being an artist. At that point in my life, I was very much interested in drawing & painting and was focusing mainly on watercolor and ink works. I was slowly accepting myself as a budding artist and immediately ran into another problem. I suppose artistic genes ran in the family, because I found myself being recognized right away for my natural talents. So, also naturally, this meant my art teachers assumed there was nothing left for me to learn and would only praise my work and teach me nothing. I was finally doing something I was passionate about, something I actually wanted to be doing everyday, but it was frustrating because I was stuck at what I felt was such a basic level. And once again, I found my parents right there supporting me in my endeavors. (Finally, they were so happy that it was art I was after!) They began giving me official lessons in drawing and painting on the weekends, setting up still-lifes and teaching me formal aspects that all my other teachers assumed I knew, like perspective.

In my family, art has always been emphasized as the most important aspect of life, right up there with those morals and values such as love, peace and happiness. By the time I was five, I was the only child still living at home; I basically received the attention of an only child in general, but even more so when it came to art. Once I became comfortable enough in my own skin that receiving art lessons from the very people whose style and art I was trying to break away from was okay was when I truly became an artist. And now, years later, I am most attracted to two-dimensional artwork and am pursuing a life revolving around it. These ceramics and three-dimensional art classes, however frustrating it may be to me now, did play an important role in my path to becoming an artist.
When I was seven years old, we had the assignment in my ceramics class to create a coil pot based off the style of another artist. This was towards the end of my ceramics career; I was burning out after tri-weekly lessons and camps in the summertime. However, I wasn’t just going to let this very exciting project go without putting my heart into it. While my classmates took the easy route by choosing Georgia O’Keefe or Vincent Van Gogh to emulate, my little (probably clay-covered) hands searched through stacks of art books until I found the perfect artist, who turned out to be Gustav Klimt. I soon had a funky, golden little coil pot with The Tree of Life growing up its edges. The significance of this coil pot, which still is on a shelf in my parent’s bedroom, is that Klimt is still the artist who has affected my artwork the most to this day.
Having other artists that inspire you and that you look up to is incredibly important as a creative person. While both my mother and my father are probably the two artists that I have the most respect for and whose styles my artwork reflects the most, Klimt has always been a icon to me. I think his work, along with many other artists who I have since discovered, both concerning the same genre and not, is perfect. It is what gives me motivation and stimulation for my own works. I think one of the best parts of being an artist is that you are automatically a part of an inventive and encouraging community. Today, it is important that artists respect and support each other, especially in our world that so very badly needs art as a part of its life. I argue that culture and creativity are one of the most important aspects of human society. It is what separates us, what makes us different than the other animals on this planet. Art has the ability to reflect the social condition of the time and it is our responsibility, as artists, to portray it.

I’m only a year and a few months away from completing my undergraduate degree at the University of Southern California. It’s often said that your college years are the best of your life and I can say that’s true, partially because they have been some of the most creative, and therefore rewarding, of my life so far. I winded up here, in the School of Cinematic Arts as a Production major and in the School of Fine Arts as a Two-Dimensional Studies minor. Oddly enough, I even ended up taking a basic Sociology course my freshman year to fulfill a general education requirement and even liked it quite a bit. But it was not art.

I think part of the reason it was hard for me to accept myself as an artist growing up was that it meant being compared to and, in whatever way, competing with the rest of my family. I was scared. Now that I’ve been following in their footsteps for a few years, I’ve realized how to find my own voice and I’ve realized how lucky I’ve been to have their support and their amazing insight on the path I’m headed down. Now that I am able to accept myself as a creative person, I am thankful for my family’s guidance and inspiration to become an artist. So what if the brushstrokes on my paintings look similar to my mother’s? What’s wrong with following down a career path that my father went down thirty years ago? I’ve completed seven short films since I first came to USC. I have never been so inspired, excited or energized by anything as much as working on a film. I feel that I am at a point of tremendous personal and artistic growth and see art and film as ways to share and express views to my generation, as well as others. Filmmaking as an art is attractive to me because I feel it provides me with a kind of stimulation and a resourceful creative outlet. I love the cooperative nature of it; I love the amount of ingenuity and the vision that must go into it. Since I’m only in my early twenties, a lot of the foresight and ideas that go into my art has a lot to do with my childhood. So thank goodness that my childhood was filled with closets full of alien heads and dinosaurs running in place! What a limited life it would be without these kinds of things.

I am lucky to have been able to discover what I love at such a young age and that I’m able to pursuit it. Within the world of film, I want to go into Production Design or Art Direction, the section of the crew responsible for the overall look of a film. They are one of the key creative roles in film and work to implement the scenic elements of the visual feel and aesthetic styles on a project. I have continued to be involved in the Fine Arts world and feel this is only helpful for me as a filmmaker. I’m still focusing on Painting (but now oils instead of watercolor) and have added Digital Photography to my emphasis, an interest that probably emerged considering my attraction to film. Most of the films that I have made since entering USC have had a very strong art influence and have often been more abstract than not. I believe that art is a reflection of life and film is one of the most powerful medias and vehicles in the world. Film is a medium that allows us to reflect on the human condition and helps to deal with issues in society. I think that art is one of the most important things we can do right now, with all of the chaos on our planet. As Anselm Kiefer once said, “I believe art has to take responsibility but it should not give up being art.” It does not matter whether it is in the form of simple entertainment, something to reflect upon, or to teach an message, contemporary filmmaking and fine art is just that much more important as the American modern world continues to direct our daily lives. As an artist, I understand that life is unlimited and that there is no such thing as impossible. At a time when some people might argue or it may seem that everything has been done, artists know that it most certainly has not.