Jennie West was a really interesting guest, and I learned a lot from her talk last week. Her perspective on earning a living based on art sounds much more reasonable to me, seeing as how she has several other business ventures like bookkeeping, which supplement her revenue that she gets from selling paintings. I feel like it is a much more secure way to go about doing art for a living.

Something that I found really interesting about her art was her idea of blind contour drawing, in which she tries to find a sort of universal visual language, in which certain shapes, colors or contours can trigger certain emotions universally. I think this could be feasible, if you think about this in an evolutionary context, in the same way that some amphibians and reptiles use bright colors and patterns to indicate to predators that they are venomous. There was also an interesting piece of research done on possible ways to mark deadly nuclear waste for future generations or even extraterrestrials who will not understand the common languages or symbols that we use, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years in the future. Possible ideas were a large basalt slab, which would render the land unhospitable and eerie, or a field of large protruding spikes, which almost universally symbolize bad news to all life forms. I think it could be really interesting to see how this could apply to art to symbolize even more than something as simple as “stay away”, since emotions outside of fear are something that are seemingly much more unique to humans. I would love to see how this venture goes in the future.