This post is going to be a lot different then the other’s I’ve posted before. But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, so please read all the way through!
The past few posts I’ve made were me trying to keep up with Raga. I had felt a little burnt out and didn’t know where I wanted to take it. All of my immediate goals had been met in a short time… make plaques, make stickers, sell some shirts, and paint anything I could get my hands on. After I had met those goals, I kept asking myself what I wanted to do with Ragamonster and how else I wanted to push it.
Not knowing what I wanted to do and running into many technical errors, I was beginning to feel a little burnt out artistically. Everyone has those times where they’ve been pushing along and they come to a point where they don’t know where to go and are unsure if they have the strength to get there.
This is exactly what happened to me. I had trouble after trouble and with the commotion of life, I didn’t have the patience to fix it. This is where Ragamonster has been dwindling for the past little while.
Sometimes, because I’m an artist and because I’m a human, I look at what Ragamonster is, especially the visual side of it, and believe that maybe it’s not good enough to be a professional project. I think of myself as just some 17 year old kid who has yet much to learn about the world and/of art in order to make anything significant someone hasn’t already done before.
I felt like something needed to change with Ragamonster… That I needed to strip it down to the bare essentials and pull out the important stuff, then get rid of everything else that was unnecessary. Such is the graphic design rule of ‘form follows function’, meaning everything I do has to serve a purpose and not just be done ‘because I can’. I felt that on top of this stripped-down version of Ragamonster, I perhaps needed to add a new twist, freshen things…
Revive things.
Revival. Something that was once great that lost its way. Watched the sky grow dark and took a wrong turn in an unfamiliar place. Then, the glorious light of day pours over above and brings things back to life. Revival.
This is where I’m at with Ragamonster right now. I want to revive it and I want it to be better than it was or could have been before. I’m not necessarily going for originality just yet, but making my own clothing and art is so inspiring to me. I see things like this:
and immediately I want to create something that will have that same affect on people. I don’t know if this picture is as powerful to you, but the clever thinking that went into planning where the shadow would be is just another way to push the envelope that I’ve never really seen before.
Slowly in the background, I’ve been working on new designs. Revamping Raga and his idiosyncrasy.
Bottom line is, I feel like I’m getting over my creative block that seems to have lasted an eternity and I feel like there are good things in store for Raga in the future.
Please be patient, remember I am only one person with a lot of school, work, and other commitments that don’t always make me so available. But do know that I’m working when you don’t always hear about it, and I’m creating art again. Not for someone else, not because I’m being told to, but because of the reason I believe all artists create.
Art is made because there is something so amazing, so wonderful, so powerful, that it builds and builds inside of an artist and has finally built so much that it becomes uncontainable and comes out in the form of whatever the artist is.
For me, sometimes that’s music, sometimes its a poem, sometimes its a photograph. But I feel like it’s Ragamonster again.
Something feels different this time. Something feels so right. And I know that it’s not going to be like the other times around. This is going to be me going for it and not overthinking it. Taking those risks and not always knowing if they’re going to turn out like they did in my head.
This time, its about being brave; having hope; revival.
