Please view the rest of the finished paintings at http://www.flickr.com/photos/smthngtwenty/sets/72157604879288514/.
In retrospect at looking back at my finished project, I could've done this differently. As a former Statistics student, I know all about populations, scientific method, etc. I don't remember all the terms, but I remember the concepts. I know that in order for surveys to work, that the people taking the survey must be representative of the general population, racially, financially, location-wise, gender-wise, etc.
In this case, I made the mistake of only asking my peers to take part in this experiment. My peers, all of which attend art school and are visual people, know how to display their anxiety in a tangible manner. They didn't need much guidance or explanation, just that I was doing a project on anxiety and that I needed them to display their own anxiety with the string. The better way to do this, would've been to ask strangers. The doorman of my apartment building, the twelve year old tourist walking with her parents (with their permission, of course), a teacher, an elderly person, a George Washington Law student. Generally people who would look at me at me like I was crazy when I asked them. Instead, with the people I asked, they automatically used the string in a way that connected with their personality, which made it very easy for me to choose the colors in which to depict them.
If I had used people who were less visual, would the string have connected with their appearances? Would they have just pretended, or would they have done as well as my peers? Would they have been less sure of themselves, would they have recognized their anxiety and the positive or negative ways they dealt with it.
This project was therapeutic for me because there were several stressful situations going on at the same time I was working on it. The time spent on it gave me the chance to think about the way I deal with my anxiety, and to think about how I myself would've displayed my anxiety with the string. Due to this project, and the situations that were happening around it, I hope to learn to deal with my anxiety in a better way, and to grow.
