Drawing Takes Time

Endurance is all about the time you have to adapt and overcome something. For some people that time lasted days, weeks, months, and years. The situation also varies over a very wide scale. One person had his arm caught under a rock for over five days. Elie Wiesel spent a year in a concentration camp during World War II. The situation I was put in lasted for one week. I was assigned to do something of my choosing for 12 hours. The amount of time I spent doing what I chose each day could have been split up in any way, as long as I eventually got those 12 hours. This project was made to prepare us for what we will encounter on the road ahead, like the previous action project. However, what makes this action project different from the previous one is our passion is the main focus this time. The activity I chose was drawing. Since I love drawing, and I already spend a lot of my time each day doing it, I was really excited for this project. My mission for this project was expanding my capabilities through drawing what I normally don't step by step. So, I had to endure what might have been a few failed drawings, but that is what this class is all about. You can't get anywhere by doing nothing. My journey started with a few sketches and now ended with me here in front of my computer writing this blog, hoping my tired brain is picking all of the right words. The video journal I made covers everything I did from beginning to end, and marks how many hours I have spent from time to time to show how much I already endured when I made each art piece. 







All the visuals, time-lapses, and even the time stamps that I put in the video were actually made and filmed during my last Spring Break. So, I did not read what we had to for this course yet, which is "Night" by Elie Wiesel, or had a guiding question and mission to guide me towards what I wanted to get out of this project as I did it. The outcome of this was me not saying things I should have in the video. To make up for that, I will say it here.

The book "Night" by Elie Wiesel provided us with an intense, yet very effective, example of endurance in this course. It is about the author's life as a young Jewish boy in Auschwitz during WWII. His journey up until he was freed is all about the hardships he had to endure, and what it took for him to survive. I can't totally compare my experience drawing for 12 hours with his years spent in prison, but I can compare a few elements between the two. 

The first thing was getting the help from others to progress. If Elie and his father weren't told by another prisoner that they must lie about their age, they would have probably died right where their journey started. If I did not learn from what other artists do to make a good piece of art, my progression in my drawing skills would have gone a lot slower by now. The second comparison is we both grow stronger in some way. Auschwitz took pretty much everything from Elie, but in return he became open to a world of questioning. He wondered things about God and his existence, he also wondered things about other people which made him read them better. In short, Elie gained a crazy amount of awareness. My drawing skills got stronger the longer I stayed in a whole new world as well. I found new ways to go about something to make it all much clearer on paper.

My mission for this project was to expand my capabilities through drawing what I normally don't. Accomplishing it meant I did something I was bad at the first time I did it, and endured all the failure I faced on my way to becoming good at it. Expanding your capabilities means being able to do something you weren't able to before. Since we are all bad at something we don't normally do, endurance is the only way forward. So, why don't you go get out of your comfort zone and try something new?

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