self-analysis

there must be a collective consciousness or psychology because my paintings i can tell now are falling into the realm of pastiche and i have only just recently begun to study postmodernism, while i've been working on my paintings for a few years now.

its a mash up of genres and eras but not involved with any sort of satire or irony. just blankly eclectic. in a critique i was told it was in fact post-modern because it was eclectic, multicultural, but infused with contemporary imagery. he suggested i add imagery of violence and feminism because it would be 'relevant'. but i don't know why i would want to perpetuate stereotypes. i also have no intention of being subversive. it just 'is'. and maybe it is an empty conglomerate.

and maybe it really is reflective of a state of pleuralism devoid of substance that we find ourselves in.

and maybe i've fallen into a place of some sort of reverse-orientalism, being a product of migration and multiple past diasporas, finding myself nowhere and with only a faded, deja vu sense of any connection with history.

although in my critique, he asserted that it was 'new', its not really new, just a product of my time and place, and definitely not close to anything avant-garde, which has been noted by others many times. there is no 'edginess'. i am not aware of what the avant-garde style is at the moment, if any. In the pseudo-avant-garde, technical proficiency is absent, and there is a continual spin on conceptualism and appropriation, which i have no proclivity to indulge myself in.

a true synthesis into something new is the challenge.