Aaron Batista Illustration

So it's been five months since I graduated and I haven't been able to get much of anything done. I've done a lot of drawing/sketching, and a whole lot of thinking, but not much in the work department.

It's not for lack of trying.

I've really been struggling over how, why, and what I do in my process in order to create a piece. Looking at the work that I've done over the past couple years in college, while proud of how far I've come and all that I've learned, I am unsatisfied with the pieces themselves. They seem too restrained to appropriately convey the ideas I am attempting to represent, or my own passion and intensity about these ideas. What's more is that when I think of this summer - the prolonged, frustrating, fruitless search for the perfect idea, the perfect little sketch that would be worthy of actually painting... and it mirrors, in a prolonged fashion, the same process I went through time after time at school, and which led to the creation of pieces that I am ultimately unhappy with.

As I look back at my work from school, the time when I was truly just doing what I wanted to do, no strings attached, was in my third year life drawing class. We were encouraged to experiment with media and mark-making, and to attempt to create some kind of narrative or idea within the piece (the course was called "illustrative drawing and painting")

I would spend hours creating these prepared backgrounds to paint on, and just get lost in the creation of these textured, colorful, interesting, intuitive pieces. I often got nervous about drawing/painting on top of these surfaces, as they were already so cool.

It didn't take days and weeks of contemplation to create something beautiful, something that satisfied both my urge to create a "finished" piece, as well as something that represented myself in a much more honest fashion. The drawings themselves were each done in a three hour class; they are far from perfect - they could have been pushed further, planned better, etc. This was me just doing what I do, without worrying about all the extraneous factors. I am an artist and I wish to create art - and I believe that it is through the process itself that I will be able to find and create meaning. I know what I like to do and now it's time to do it.

So anyway here are some pictures of these inspirational life drawings from my third year.