Minecraft and Me

I have constructed great mansions and cities. I have swum across vast oceans. I have climbed the tallest of peaks. And I have accidentally spawned a chicken into an underground waterfall, which in turn, horridly washed it into a magma chamber where I surprisingly procured some cooked chicken from its invisible corpse. 

This severely scarred me, for I am all about animal rights and I am a strict vegetarian, even in Minecraft.

Since 7th grade, Minecraft has been an integral function in the large, strange, internal series of mechanisms that keep me sane. It is a way to let off steam while additionally allowing my imagination to run wild in an infinite world filled with infinite possibilities. Sometimes, I heavily rely on the game to almost literally transport me into another world, one where I can cover the sky with a rainbow-like assortment of wool or lurk in the deep mine shafts that twist and tangle below the surface of the block-like trees. Other times, the app peacefully chills on my phone's second screen, sometimes months on end, waiting for me with an ever-present patience and thirst for my reentrance into our shared worlds once more. 

Yet even after those extended droughts or the few times when I had became so undeniably upset by accidentally deleting one of my personalized, homey worlds, I have routinely come back to the app. When I imagine a life where Minecraft does not accompany me as an integral part of my being, I feel strange, for so much of who I am has blossomed from the app. Yet, in the end, I create anew. I mine. I craft.

       - J. A. Kind

Frannerd Is Back

Perspective

When I first saw this piece on Frannerd’s blog, I stopped.  I was amazed by the vibrancy of the pastel colors and the simple elegance that the piece depicted.  However, after a few minutes of looking further at what the piece evoked for me, I found the deeper meaning for as to why the piece had initially caught my attention: the perspective of the piece was extremely calculated and precise.  Within Frannerd’s piece there are slight overlays among subjects which in turn create an interconnectedness within the piece.  This interconnectedness then, plays into the overall story within the piece, for it shows unity among characters.  This also adds to the plot of the overall storyline within the work.  

 

I found this use of perspective extremely useful when I analyzed Frannerd’s work, so I decided to use the concept in my own piece.  In “Woman in a Blue Dress,” I too tried to use perspective in order to create unity within my piece and the story of my piece.  I did this by creating an angled scene in which almost the conversation of the piece follows the viewers eye movement.  By manipulating the perspective of my piece I was able to create a story that begins with the umbrella and woman in a blue dress and eventually winds down the angled plane until it concludes with the conversation between the two figures in the back.  Overall, I think perspective really did aid me in my story telling abilities and I am very thankful for Frannerd and her work for introducing me to the topic.

       - J. A. Kind

Just To Keep Things Spontaneous

I did not create this

beauty.

      - J. A. Kind

A Dose Of Negativity

Life often feels like difficult crud.

Let’s face it. During almost every single period of your existence there is probably going to be something in your life that is honestly just not that much fun. Maybe a lover cheats, maybe your bank balance is only in the double digits, or maybe Netflix is being shaky because your Internet provider lies about the quality of their service. Nevertheless, it is statistically probable that something in your life is wrong. Something should be fairly unideal.

Quite frankly, if nothing in your life is suckishly going down the drain, no matter how menial that thing may be, something should probably feel severely off. In a cosmopolitan, universal sense, there has to be some aspect of your life that isn’t going right. Perhaps it’s the collection of aggressive clouds hovering claustrophobically above you. Or rather, it might be the absence of those very clouds and the sheer annoyance of sunlight. Or even more realistically, it could be the irrefutable fact that you will never know what the weather is going to be like in the first place, since meteorologists can’t seem to do their jobs. Nevertheless, perfection, the complete dissipation of annoyances, mistakes, flaws, etc., is creepily unnatural.

That very perfection is usually formed through the excessive wrong-doing of overly optimistic viewpoints. Things can look like they’re going places, life can seem positive, and hope can wholeheartedly feel graspable. Maybe, but life still is difficult and cruddy.

So switch it up.

Look at the negative. No matter how positive that negativity may seem, it still lurks in your shadows, the corners of your eyes, and the little crevices and fleshy areas of your body that you rarely check for malignant birthmarks or tumors. Something is negative; sometimes you only have to look hard enough to find it. Imagine the possibilities for the negativity; oftentimes it helps.

You might cross the street and get hit by some automobile. You might get cancer of the [insert body part]. Or even more incredibly, you might get fatally struck by an atmospherically miniaturized asteroid. Anything negative could happen. And more importantly, anything negative could be happening – for after all, life is difficult and cruddy.

Yet what’s frequently most difficult, is the misconception of calm, the utter, unadulterated uppercut from life into that seemingly beautiful, yet oh-so-ignorant, pearly smile you don. For you could be having the best day of your existence: your enemy on Game of Thrones could become poisoned; you could win the largest lottery in recorded history; or you could finally break that Kit Kat so that it satisfactorily mimics the impossible crunch caught on those melodic commercials. But then, as if you were unjustly awarded with an excess of positivity, your lover cheats, your bank balance drops to the double digits, and your Netflix stream stutters. And thus, equilibrium is universally achieved and the unfortunate thematic concept of your existence floats along your storyline as life, once more, is awfully difficult and cruddy.

Yet astonishingly, something doesn't even need to strike you with the overbearing sense of hopelessness and universal betrayal for your life to feel difficult and cruddy. Things could be happening to the lives of your family members, your friends, your coworkers, or even those children in Africa you are so often ignorantly reminded of for the overbearing difficulty of life to knock on your door once more.

And oh how it will knock. At times, the knocking may seem like the usual beat that accompanies you as life quickly, yet somehow uneventfully passes you by. While other times, the knock will incapacitate you with such an alarming degree, magnitude, and velocity, that you yourself will no longer feel your own life feeling difficult. And so, you numb. You crystalize and harden, blocking helping hands yet also paradoxically stagnating the very cause of your dazed paralysis.

Smack yourself and wake up. Wake up and smell the proverbial difficult crud, because yes, your life reeks of it, and so do ours. However, after you wake up, don’t continue your pre-established, cyclical storyline. As Khaleesi from GOT would demand, “Break the wheel.”

Instead of putting on your tough face, your happy face, your everyday face, stop. Get down, deep, and dirty, take off your mask, and analyze the crud out of your difficult, cruddy life. After all, you might just notice that that very difficult crud, when all is said and done, is merely the ingested and digested parts of your life. Your difficult crud is you.

So yes, life often feels like difficult crud. It should.

     - J. A. Kind

Joanna Concejo Is Back

Texture

I am not sure if you remember Joanna Concejo, but a few months back I wrote a piece about her creative, illustrative works.  I really find her artwork inspiring - especially the piece below.  I found the textures of both the bear and the boy in her work to be awesome (in the true sense of the word).  Not only do the almost palpable textures make the piece seem like a portal to another world, but they also add to the meaningfulness of the story within the piece.  To me, when I see the individual furs on the bear and the cloth of the boy’s shirt and how dense those very textures are, I get an underlying feeling that there is more to these characters than meets the eye.  The bear becomes more realistic through his textured fur, and in turn the story behind the bear also becomes more realistic.  This concept can also be applied to the boy and his shirt.  Moreover, this adds another dimension to the work as a whole, adding somewhat of a grit to both of the characters, which makes the overall themes and plot of the piece more interesting (in relation to the piece’s story).  

Thus, because I saw from Concejo’s work that texture was a great asset to use within a piece, I tried creating a piece that heavily relied on texture in order to tell the story – this piece was “The Collage of Persephone.  In the piece, every major aspect of the subject and her surroundings has a different texture: to name a few, her skin is patchy, her hair is composed of many long lines, the flowers are densely packed with smaller details, and the drips in the background are solid black.  This shows different aspects of my character and her surroundings in relation to the overall story of the piece.  The patchy skin shows that she is hiding something, yet that she also is composed of many different concepts – she’s multidimensional.  Another example would be the darkness and density of the flowers shows that they are not just beautiful but also possibly dangerous.  Thus overall, I was heavily influenced by Joanna Concejo’s work in that I realized how great texture can be in order to tell a story within a piece. 

        - J. A. Kind