All great ideas are dangerous – Oscar Wilde

I wrote before about the differences I notice immediately after coming from a liberal school to an art school, but perhaps the biggest difference is the class structure.

We’re not talking social hierarchy here, we’re talking about a nine to five job and not two three hour sessions of this or that class per week. We’re also talking about having one set thing to do – this term it’s to create a body of work based on sequence/multiples/narrative. The End.

As you can imagine, throwing Americans in to this nebulous cloud when they’re used to strict guidelines kind of freaks them out and I was no exception.

For two or three weeks now I’ve been flexing my fingers, my eyes all bugged out repeating “What am I going to do, what am I going to do,” every waking – and even sometimes non-waking, moments of the day.

Little did I imagine that a rather plausible idea would sneak up on me and scream “BOO!” thinking I had the hiccups.

In all truth though, the idea did sneak up on me but I think that I had my eyes closed.

Before I even left for Scotland, I had this idea to make a scrapbook, but not in either the old fashioned or my GIS way. I wanted to paint things around the city, people, buildings, etc. and bind them into a book. I wanted to do at least one per week. Approximately twenty-four pages.

Well, that’s all well and good but it was just going to be a side project – I had dabbled a little bit for it, but I hadn’t started and I didn’t really mean to until it got warmer.

Well, I told Brandy my idea yesterday and, in passing, she said I could even do that for my project.

Lightbulb! But it still wasn’t good enough. There were too many kinks. Oil was too much to carry around the city and the book would end up being a toothy monster. Pastel was too messy. I don’t have enough experience with watercolor. Nothing else seemed interesting.

I put the idea aside.

Today, in Life Room, Stuart asked us to draw with our non-dominant hand. I was like “grooooaaaan” but, well, I was hooked. I drew like that for the rest of the day. I even shunned my beloved pastels for it. I tested what it looked like switching between right to left, holding the pen differently, etc.

Then there it was – a project idea. My first plausible one of the term thus far.

I would make my book, but I would do it in pen, left handed. Then I would use a media I wasn’t comfortable with – watercolor – to introduce some color. In the end, it’s a compendium of foreign experience, experienced in a foreign way, by a foreign person.

So, perhaps this idea will evolve or I will choose something else to do for my exhibition here, but this book will be made. I’ve already started.

With the book, I want to add some information about each page, creating a sense of scrapbook-iness. I think I want to do that with tissue paper sort of stuff laid over the image.

So, if this is in fact a “great idea,” it seems like it could become that dangerous prospect that Wilde talks about. I can see it now – Me, traveling Europe with my little pad of watercolor paper, drawing EVERYTHING with the wrong hand, taking notes on color and reliving it all later when I finish the page with color.