Aesthetic vs. the Intellectual

Before I came to BYU I made art.  I loved painting, that's what I'd tell people that I did when they asked me.  "Oh, you're an artist?  What kind of stuff do you like to make?"  I'd tell them that I liked a lot of stuff and that I painted and then they would want to know "what kind of stuff"  I painted.  Do you like landscapes, portraits, still life...?" It's kind of a funny way of thinking about art.  I didn't really consider myself a landscape or portrait or still life painter but I knew what I liked to paint.  It was mostly representational but it all fell under the umbrella of "my aesthetic."

When I came to college and I was presented with contemporary art I really did feel like I was drowning.  I could barely wrap my mind around what my professors were saying.  I started to appreciate the work and I felt a pressure to make that kind of work but I didn't know how.  I remember my first attempts.  Eventually I realized that contemporary artists usually make work about issues that interest them.  I started finding weird patterns that I put into my art when I started making art about things.  It taught me a lot about the visual way that my mind processed information.  Art became more satisfying in an intellectual way to me.  I make a lot of art about language.  Some of it deals with the languages I do speak and the way those interact or oppose each other.  Some of it deals with the doors that are closed to me because I don't speak languages.  Chinese is an especially important one to me because I am half Taiwanese.  I don't speak Chinese.  That means one of the doors that is closed to me is an open conversation with my family members.  I've never really talked to my Grandma, I have a limited perspective on what my aunts and uncles and cousins are like.

For me that art was very intellectually satisfying, but I still feel like I struggle with the aesthetic side of art.  I feel almost embarrassed to admit it because I feel like I'm "not supposed to like" representational art, but there is something that I like about representing things.  I DO like digging into a color or a texture.  I do like having a vision for what I want to make and then being able to compare it with what I make.  Since my minds eye is a little blurry it does feel kind of satisfying to look at something that's physical and tactile and then represent it.  I think part of me struggles with my intellectual art because it doesn't do that for me.  Maybe it's that I don't have anything physical to compare it to.  Maybe it's that it isn't really representational.  It doesn't visually move me.  It intellectually does.  Part of me wonders why I can't do both.  I haven't quite figured out how to yet.