Nowadays, it seems as if life just speeds right past us. We take in media every day and go through experience after experience. It is so important to stop every now and then to see how far we’ve come. When you look back, you might remember a particular song or show that takes you back to when days might have been better (or worse) than they are now. These are the things that helped shape the person you are today.
With the end of the school year upon us, I figured why not spend a moment to take a stroll down memory lane.
Let’s get a little nostalgic why don’t we?
Van Gogh & Jackson Pollock
I remember sitting in my art classroom in middle school experimenting with paints. I was hit with a spontaneous urge to grab tubes of paint in shades of blue, violet, and green and grabbed a brush and began to paint whatever idea was sprouting in my mind. I dragged the colors across my canvas and a little over two hours later, I had created a landscape. Inspired by Van Gogh’s starry night, splotches of jewel-toned galaxies spilled across as a night sky behind a range of mountains. The painting struck my teacher’s eyes and she had sent it off to compete with other student’s artwork to be presented in a show in the city. My painting had been one of the pieces chosen and I have always been grateful to my art teacher for giving me that opportunity.
Flash forward a couple years and we’re learning about abstract expressionism in my art history class. It’s that style of art that many people and myself at the time would see and immediately think, “my cat could do that.” But as I learned more about it, I found that this art movement was much more than a bunch of squiggles on a canvas. It’s about the unconscious outpouring of emotion, not about representation. If you look closely at any piece, you can almost feel how the paint was put on. Every artist that I’d learn about thereafter would continue to inspire me to create my own art and even lead me to want to major in the subject.
Ed Sheeran’s “+”
My friends and I were so hyped for this album. Ed Sheeran’s “+” makes me reminiscent of the days when we’d fangirl over the next big artist in music, boybands and all. This album was played on repeat the minute it was released and we even saw him perform at Madison Square Garden. Whenever I listen to the album it reminds me of the days that my friends and I would stroll around our neighborhood after a football game, cool autumn days and the little moments that we would spend together.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Growing up I was always on the shy side, clinging onto my friends, doing whatever they were because I was hesitant to branch out and do my own thing. I knew that I could be doing so much more. There were little spurts of progress every now and then and I found myself at a crossroads during my junior year of high school. We read Jane Eyre in class and by the end of it, my outlook on life changed.
It wasn’t the romance that got to me, it was the inner strength and independence Jane had that was beyond her time. She had this relentless spirit to keep on going even though she had no one to rely on. There was no one telling her that everything was going to be okay, but that didn’t stop her from continuing to live life the way she wanted to.
So, what shaped who you are?