I am writing this post now, on this Blue Monday, because the task of designing and creating a portfolio is finally finished. I only need to go through it tomorrow and maybe add a couple of things but the whole process is finally finished, ended, done.
And I hated every moment of it.
[ps: it's not true, it's not true]I found it overwhelming, emotionally draining, complicated, constraining, incomprehensible. And I felt that my life was in the hands of :
the printers
the tutors
the ones who decided the parameters of how a portfolio should be (aren’t we artists and hence free by definition?!)
the ones who will look at it and decide if I am fit or not to go to their university
colleagues who were potentially needing the space I needed to make this… thing
Most important than all of the above, was the fact that:
I was told that ONE day would have been enough, and instead, it took me FOUR!
While creating the portfolio, I was making MORE work out of the portfolio’s constraints.
I made pieces along the way, I took pictures of these pieces, and then I had to display those pictures in an appealing and academic and codified way. Work on top of work and out of work.
I am writing now sitting down with a coffee, feet up. I haven’t looked at it for the past couple of days and in a couple of days, I will be heading towards my first interview-with-portfolio. I don’t know how I feel. Hopeful? Scared? Cocky? Determined? Mrs Know-All?
I know, I know: I’m scared. Of not being liked, of my work not being accepted, understood, appreciated. I also know that I will be ok, but if I don’t admit my fear now, where would I?
I also have to admit that the process of mounting the pictures and creating physically the pages took me back years to when I was doing technical precision drawing and I have to thank my teachers at the time and my dad for teaching me precision, dedication, planning, structuring. If I have to do anything, I may as well do it right.
My drawing professor always told me: you hold your pencil and then you think. You think once, twice, three times. You draw first in your head and only then you draw it with your pencil. You clean the ruler, you clean the space, you take your time, you work clean. Be precise, be precise, be precise.
So, in the end, I am actually very proud of myself, for the process in itself.
Hard, but worth it.
Here are some pictures I took along the way, of the process and my system of mechanisation.
