Leonardo and Work

I figured it would be somewhat appropriate to blog about Leonardo since we started talking about him in our art history class yesterday.

Presenting our final projects, I noticed there was a lot of room for expanding ideas -- there usually is. There's a strange situation with being an art student. We start projects and then have to move on to the next idea -- quickly, and it's hard to keep the life of any one given project when there's so many that have to be done.

I try to pour my ideas, premature as they may be, into the work I have to put out in class. A sort of pre-exploration of any concept that might interest me. Often I haven't finished them -- but that's the point; they're not finished. Like Leonardo Da Vinci said, "a work is never finished, only abandoned."

La Scapigliata (pictured here) is like a visualization of this idea. There's a beauty to our ideas, as bare as they are, but they continue there -- rough outlines, the embryos of what could be a great exploration.

I was talking to one of the girls I was going to photograph for an assignment. We talked about work and how much we had to do -- I advised that work has life outside of the classroom and our assignments. If we think of work as a grade and not a self-accomplishment merely asserted or denied by a grade, art's beauty can soon become tedious.

I've abandoned a great deal of works, but I intend on going back and exploring ideas over and over again. Some of them are bound to not happen, but we're always sure to find something new in the old.

Leonardo was always finding something new -- that was his greatness and his failure. We need only accept the fact that these things are still a move forward, even if they remain static in the timeline of our work's life.

Art breathes - even the incomplete type.