Reflection

My name is Aracely Sanchez. I am a senior attending Cesar Chavez High School and am currently in the process of completing my second year of AP Studio Art. I have been taking art classes consecutively for all four years of my high school career and all throughout my elementary and middle school years. However, my artistic journey started long before I had even started school at all. Since I learned how to pick up a pencil all I wanted to do was draw. I turned furniture into canvases and used up all the printer paper way before it should have been gone, but my family didn’t mind. In fact, I was encouraged to create art whenever I could or pleased to do so. Come elementary school and I quickly became the quiet art kid who would draw in silence and do the drawings on the presentation boards. During my free time I began to delve into my own smaller projects such as writing and illustrating a comic book and filming movies with my friends and family. I have very many fond memories of all my art teachers, and I owe a lot to them for constantly teaching and encouraging me to fall in love with creating all over again. I started to take it more seriously when I won my very first professional 1st place ribbon for a watercolor piece I painted and submitted to the school art show in middle school. On my 8th grade promotion day, I received a certificate of art for, “Using Color to Express Emotions”. My junior year, which was my first year in AP Studio art, I finished the class strong, receiving a 5 on my completed portfolio. That same year I was awarded 2nd in my class during the school art show. One of my bigger accomplishments has been receiving 1st place in the drawing category in the district art show, which was a self-portrait done in color pencil on an unfolded cereal box. 

 

I have been working on my capstone project since the beginning of the school year. With the guidance of my art teacher, I have been following a theme that is prevalent in every piece I have done. Throughout the year I have taken the liberty to experiment with different elements in my art. A part of my mission has been to recreate the style of art nouveau while incorporating the things that I like from my personal style. I found that coffee-stained paper contributed to my pieces and the art nouveau inspired idea. Other grounds have been interesting to explore such as toned paper that ranged from lighter colors to extremely dark tones. It was also my first time using a sample from a cardboard box that I was able to cut into for a visually appealing background. Oil pastels are something that I was completely new to and found that I really enjoyed their ability to blend easily, and it was fun to work with the small quantity of colors available until I achieved the right tone, tint, and shade. I still created some pieces with watercolor because that is a medium that I have always and will always have fun with. As much as I have had fun with the process of every project, I have definitely hit a wall more than once when it felt like there was nothing more for me to show, even if I knew that there are infinite possibilities when it comes to speaking through art. That never stopped me from eventually having a good time in that class of course, but with every challenge, one is bound to feel stuck at times. 

 

I chose to focus my theme on Spanish idioms and the art nouveau style. The art nouveau srtyle was one that was popularized in the late 1800s, to the early 1900s. It intrigued me to see was the style would look like if it were done with the new materials we have today. I wanted to take some popular, as well as some hidden idioms that have been used for generations in Mexican culture and explore them deeper. I took a total of three that I wanted to interpret and turn into scenarios. One that I had heard often growing up, especially from my mom, was “encontrar mi media naranja”. This roughly translates to, “to find the other half to my orange”. As one might guess, this idiom refers to someone finding their best friend, or their soulmate. The second idiom I investigated was, “el nopal nomas se le arriman cuando tiene tunas”, or “people only go near the cactus when it has fruit”. This one has a bit of a darker definition than the first, as it is referring to a person that is only wanted by others when they have something to offer, otherwise they are left untouched and ignored like a cactus without fruit. The last idiom is, “meter la pata”, or roughly “to put your feet in”. This means when someone makes a mistake out of curiosity, they later come to regret it. All of these are used in completely different situations. I chose to use some common ones and some not so common to teach other Mexican-American kids about the part of their culture that no one really speaks about. I for one knew about maybe two idioms and I realized that I had known about a lot of them but had no clue what they really meant. These are phrases that out grandparents, great grandparents, and out ancesters have been using for so long. We have created inside jokes, poetry, songs, and stories that include many idioms. Slowly, new generations are leaving this part of our culture behind, but I would argue that these phrases are more important than we realize, and I am hoping others can start to recognize that too. 

 

Taking fine arts courses throughout every grade level has been a big help to my education overall. To me, art classes have not been ones to stress over in comparison to my other classes, I instead view them as these breaks within the school day to relieve stress from my other courses. There have been moments in which I have been overwhelmed with schoolwork and wished I didn’t need to worry about finishing an art piece but there will be random moments of stress when everything compiles and in those cases I have been able to eventually push through and get back to enjoying my classes. 

 

Since my goal this year was to investigate as many idioms as I could I decided not to choose only one, however, if I were to do this project again I would decide on one idiom to focus on and see how deep I could explore it. For now, I plan on ending my investigation strong and showing a new side to each idiom that I have not shared in previous works.