Anxiety

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.

Colors in Emotion

About four million adult Americans, the majority being women, suffer from extreme anxiety disorders. Symptoms can be physical, like severe headaches, nausea, the need to use the bathroom, insomnia, and exhaustion; or they can be more mental, such as excessive or exaggerated worry or nervousness, irrationalizing, restlessness, and being easily startled. Anxiousness is an emotion that greatly influences how you live your life, whether you are more anxious, or less so.
“Emotion” is defined as “a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from ones’ circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.” Emotion comes naturally, as it is natural to feel sad if a family member dies, or happy if you were to win a contest.
There are seven core emotions, listed as happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, and contempt. Interestingly enough, the majority of the emotions- five, actually, are negative. One is neutral- surprise, and only one is positive, this being happiness. Most of the emotions are negative because negative emotions are more necessary for survival. In animalistic terms, a dog could be afraid that another dog might steal its food, a dog could be surprised that another dog stole its food, then could have anger and contempt toward the other dog, enough to attack the other dog and retrieve its food. Happiness lasts very shortly, as long as it takes to scarf down a meal in comparison to how long it took to rescue the meal.
The seven core emotions as listed above can be expanded and mixed into more complicated emotions such as joy, satisfaction, amazement, curiosity, rage, annoyance, loathing, boredom, grief, pensiveness, terror, and yes, anxiousness. The mixing of emotions can be compared to making a color wheel or making a gradation scale with paint. The way adding different colors or shades of black and white can bring a color to a whole other level, just as different inside and outside influences can make an emotion feel very differently. One could be in a good mood “just because” but something great could happen and then you’d feel “joyful.” You might be in a bad mood and the day could be very normal and average, so you might just be bored.
This concept can be expanded on in the sense each main emotion could have base color. But, interestingly enough, the colors could be the same. Happiness, in my opinion, is a bright color that could be a beautiful sky blue, or bright yellow, or even a light pink.
Surprise is a neutral feeling that could be gray, or possibly a yellow, although not as bright as happiness. It could even be a brown, since you need every color to reach that shade.
Fear, again could be a garish or even greenish yellow, or bright shade of an explosive red. Red could also be anger, and anger can always be Black. Sadness could be shades of blue and purple, and contempt, for me, dances closely to envy, which is always green.
Everyone experiences these emotions, which especially shows through facial coding, which is a system developed by the scientists by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen in 1976 to catalog emotions all around the world. This system found that everywhere, even people who live in isolated third world villages, even those who are blind, react facially the same way you or I would. Everyone smiles or laughs when they’re happy, everyone cries or frowns when they’re sad. Everyone’s eyebrows furrow down in anger. Which means, that no matter where you go, even if you don’t understand the language spoken, you can at least rely on the faces people are making.
My final project will combine the idea of the seven core emotions mixing and combining to create different sides of anxiety, whether it’s a looser, calmer “it will all work out fine,” kind of anxiety, or a tighter more negative angry, sad side of anxiety. Several paintings will depict different people playing with thread, wearing different colored clothing and with different background colors. The most blatant symbol of anxiety in each painting will be bright red thread tangled up in each persons’ hands, tangled more so if they are more anxious, or hanging between their fingers if they are less so. I chose the color red for the thread because it is a strong, passionate, and noticeable color. The background colors used will be a little more subtle symbols of anxiety. Each painting I will choose colors, that if mixed together, will either form a more positive or negative symbol of anxiety, and these colors will be the title of each piece, for example: Red + Blue. By doing these series of paintings I hope to combat my own anxiety and the negative way I approach it. The project will widely be open to interpretation, and is also strongly personel in how I view the colors and the way I associate them with anxiety.

Final Proposal

Research: Anxiety, how people deal with anxiety and surrounding emotions, human reaction

Materials: Canvas, acrylic, sharpies, pen and ink on paper

Objective:
As a person who often has intense anxiety problems I wanted to do a series symbolizing anxiety and how people tend about worry at situations until they are a much bigger problem then originally. For my final project, I will paint and draw realistic portraits of people playing with bright red string. Skin colors will remain duller then usual, while the string will be almost too bright, symbolizing the intense feeling of anxiety. I will do a minimum of three variations of this idea, with the string becoming tighter and more tangled up through the progression of the portraits. This idea is based on a theory from the book Emotionomics, by Dan Hill, in which he compares mixing colors to mixed emotions.
This makes sense when applied to anxiety could mean you’re feeling sad but also scared that things won’t get better, that situations could get worse. You could be angry but confused, in the same way colors such as grey have blue, green, or even purplish tints.

To connect my pieces to color, I will relate each color to a kind of an emotion, such as red equals anger, blue equals sad. Then, I will title each painting a mix of those colors, like “Red + Blue”, which would, in
this context, become its own brand of anxiety. Red being anger and blue being sad, this would mean this painting would be a more negative side of anxiety while if yellow, were to equal happy, and you added blue, this could be a more positive butterflies-in-your-stomach kind of anxiety. This title would bring the piece in full circle back to the subject pulling at the ball of string until it becomes a bigger problem then it was originally.

What Does Your Favorite Color Say About You?

A couple years ago I got to know people by asking their favorite color. It’s an icebreaker, and it’s a way to know somebody, slightly. I believe in auras and favorite colors can apply to that, although not always. My favorite color is pink. That speaks to my more girly, fashion-oriented and materialistic side. My romantic side. My roommate’s favorite color is orange, which makes sense to me because he likes to be loud and outgoing and sometimes it’s kind of annoying but usually it’s a positive thing. Most of my pot-smoking friends say “green” for obvious reasons. Blue is calm, but deep. It reminds me oceans and my ocean-eyed boyfriends. My friends that say their color is blue are generally easy going and have interesting views on life, whether negative or positive. Yellow, depending on the shade, applies to my bright, optimistic friends. Red is a more passionate version of orange. My brother’s favorite color is red. He likes to be strong and macho but also has his sweet moments, when his buds aren’t around. He’s grown up now, but I still remember when his favorite color was “bubblegum.”
Your favorite color doesn’t really need to say anything about you. It doesn’t have to be analysis of the deeper parts of your personality, and this idea is mostly based on stereotypes and my experiences with my friends and their favorite colors. Or their lack there-of. Some of my friends didn’t have a favorite color and tended to be worse at decision making, creating plans and following them, but they were content with that. Friends who said they liked all of them were kind of the same way but more optimistic and a little more ADD.
But, really, what do I know?

Color In DC

Downtown DC is colorless. It’s filled with plain business suits and drained looking people. Bleached white monuments and grey pavement. On the bad days I’m bored. Black secret service cars, the most color you see is homeless peoples’ ragged carts filled with their lifestyles and ambulances’ flashing lights leading to GW hospital. Georgetown, despite all the popular stores like Urban Outfitters is colorless and bland in itself, lacking a lot of diversity in the rich GW students, business suited men going to lunch and the odd hobo begging for change. Most of the time I love DC, especially on sunny days, but I miss large green parks that more people then just drug users and hobos sit in. I miss the blue lagoon across from my house at home. Sometimes I come home from school feeling grey like everyone else in this city and I don’t question the fact that Washington was rated one of the ugliest cities in the US. Everyone’s stressed and tired all the time, and I felt most at home when driving with the windows open on a sunny, windy, warm day around Arlington Cemetery and the Park Way. Growing up in Wisconsin where fields and farms and trees and hills are plentiful you forget how much you take the color green for granted. Green is the color of things that are alive, and on bad days, Washington, DC is the color of things that are dead.

Issues In Color

Milwaukee, Wisconsin is still one of the most racially segregated cities in the Midwest. A good friend of mine, who’s a Russian immigrant who moved here when he was six, remembers living in Milwaukee in a time when there was still a pretty real Russian district. Even now it’s still easy to tell when you cross cultural lines, whether it’s in the downtown Third Ward White bread part of the city or the darker Marquette university area. Race and color are still a pretty real issue in our society. Being black or white or all the colors in between still creates severe stereotyping, and minorities still make less money then the average white person with the same job. We’re finally at the age when it’s very possible that a black man might be voted president, and the thing that’s still sad is that it took so long.
I grew up at the most diverse high school in Madison, Wisconsin, which is the second most diverse city in Wisconsin after Milwaukee and definitely more integrated, but still relatively white bread compared to most cities of the US. At the end of the year the state newspaper printed quotes and thoughts about graduating from various valedictorians from different Wisconsin high schools. One student talked about how his student body would have to be in much more culturally diverse situations and that would be a big step for them, which honestly was alien to me. The year before that there was a situation at a basketball game where the rich private school started chanting statements remarking on our large poor student body, saying “Food Stamps clap clap Food Stamps” and “Your dad works for my dad.” It of course almost caused a huge fight and I still think those students deserve to get the crap beat out of them. The idea that anyone would think that something like that would be remotely okay just blows me away. I’m saddened by the issues that should already be past, whether its race or genders or homosexuality. All differences should be celebrated, and risking a terrible cliché, like a rainbow.
This past year I painted a mural for my school, which pictured me and two friends, a white girl and a black boy. I’d never really painted anyone of color before, not really because of any reason other then I’ve only really painted self-portraits. Painting my friend was a large challenge. He’s got beautiful chocolate skin and the best smile of anybody I’ve ever met. But you don’t use just browns, but also oranges and pinks and purples. Chocolate has so many amazing shades. I can’t say I was blown away but this discovery, as if African American people are automatically just one color, but I’d never examined anyone’s skin color so closely before, if only just because painting pale skin colors comes naturally since I look at my own pale skin every day. I’m proud to say the murals done by me and my other friends’ displays all different kind of students, colors, beliefs, and lifestyles. We are diverse and I’ll always be proud of where I came from, especially coming from generally White Wisconsin.

Dark And Light

I never really used to understand why Black and White aren’t technically described as colors, until recently. When I was little, they were still colors in a crayon, so what difference did it make? It was one of those statements like my fourth grade teacher saying, “There’s so such thing as can’t.” Kids can’t take things conceptually. Everything’s so literal. “Can’t” is a word. And that’s that.
Black used to dominate my wardrobe, and now I really understand how devoid of color I really was. Wearing black predominantly makes you look paler then you are and you’re not very approachable, Black doesn’t reflect light, it swallows it.
White, on the other hand, is of course; also colorless but is nothing but light. It tints light instead of takes over it, when mixing paints or pastels.
I used to only draw with charcoal, just black, and maybe some white accents. Painting opened me up to a whole new world of color and understanding and expression. I love skin colors, and how subtle things like veins and blush and shine in the hair. I filled my sketchbooks with acrylics and sharpies, layering colors and cutouts and sketches on top of each other.