rock painting
Apr. 18th, 2022 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spacefemlast year my rock painting group met up in a park on a hot july day for a National Paint A Rock Hide A Rock Day. It was nice to see facebook group enthusiasts in person, but I found the event itself to be a little weird. It was started by a random facebook person in some other city, sure, and the group wanted to join up, but the group for the event was smaller than our group so really, we were doing them a publicity favor.
for this day we were asked to paint BLUE ROCKS WITH RED HEARTS on them, and DO NOT DEVIATE FROM THE PLAN. They had this mantra that rock painting should be simple enough for even kids to get into. Paint as many BLUE ROCKS WITH RED HEARTS as we could and get a big photo and then hide them out in the world to uplift people like rock painters do.
Once we'd committed to the event I learned that they might even remove a photo if the rock had anything fancy about it - lace edges, doodles in the heart, anything that might intimidate a newbie and make them feel inferior. All rocks must be the same so that new rock painters know that they can do it too.
So I did it, painted 10-15 BLUE ROCKS WITH RED HEARTS but then I started losing my mind out of sheer boredom.
And I decided I hated the "philosophy" that we should bring our art down to the lowest common denominator to be nice and encourage each other. Look - I'm no artist. my rock painting is either quite simple, or laughingly bad. There are real artists in my rock painting group, with 15000 people there are examples of amazing things I can never do. I LOVE them! I don't feel bad about myself, I don't feel inferior. I love the diversity, the inspiration, the fact that all different levels and colors can be part of the same group.
I'm a group admin so I wonder if I should express my thoughts and tell my group that we should have our own official day, or start a different holiday, and just pretend like we haven't noticed this BLUE ROCK RED HEART thing because it's BS. nothing to see here! Then take a big group photo with all our rocks doing all the things. call it "WE'RE AWESOME" day, paint whatever we want, celebrate all our colors and bust out of the uniforms?
Or I could quit being picky and just be supportive of somebody else's idea.
for this day we were asked to paint BLUE ROCKS WITH RED HEARTS on them, and DO NOT DEVIATE FROM THE PLAN. They had this mantra that rock painting should be simple enough for even kids to get into. Paint as many BLUE ROCKS WITH RED HEARTS as we could and get a big photo and then hide them out in the world to uplift people like rock painters do.
Once we'd committed to the event I learned that they might even remove a photo if the rock had anything fancy about it - lace edges, doodles in the heart, anything that might intimidate a newbie and make them feel inferior. All rocks must be the same so that new rock painters know that they can do it too.
So I did it, painted 10-15 BLUE ROCKS WITH RED HEARTS but then I started losing my mind out of sheer boredom.
And I decided I hated the "philosophy" that we should bring our art down to the lowest common denominator to be nice and encourage each other. Look - I'm no artist. my rock painting is either quite simple, or laughingly bad. There are real artists in my rock painting group, with 15000 people there are examples of amazing things I can never do. I LOVE them! I don't feel bad about myself, I don't feel inferior. I love the diversity, the inspiration, the fact that all different levels and colors can be part of the same group.
I'm a group admin so I wonder if I should express my thoughts and tell my group that we should have our own official day, or start a different holiday, and just pretend like we haven't noticed this BLUE ROCK RED HEART thing because it's BS. nothing to see here! Then take a big group photo with all our rocks doing all the things. call it "WE'RE AWESOME" day, paint whatever we want, celebrate all our colors and bust out of the uniforms?
Or I could quit being picky and just be supportive of somebody else's idea.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-19 12:13 pm (UTC)