Fundamental.

My final assignment was due this week, and we were supposed to do a poster design for a international design competition in Taiwan where the theme was fundamental. And sooo I spent a little over a week doing nothing but trying to design the poster. I say trying because I spent about half of that time stoning in front of my computer waiting for inspiration to hit.

And so this was the result:

Hahaha no I'm not showing off and I don't think I put in a lot of effort compared to other people, but this was still about 2 days of work manipulating the text path by path and trying out 50 different colour schemes and blending effects.

Then when I showed my lecturer my work, he asked me to open the file in Photoshop and began telling me to remove the background, the brushes, the overlays, the half-tone dots, basically remove everything until my design was like this:

And then he told me to print and submit that for the competition, which I did.

Haha I think I was kind of stoned when I realised that all the time and effort I spent was wasted. I wasn't really angry, I think I was just reluctant to remove all the other elements of the poster that I did. And I realised that maybe I was holding on to those elements simply because I had spent so much time and energy on them, and not because they actually added anything to the design.

I guess you could say that my lecturer took the fundamental part of my fundamental poster. Ha.

Anyways, I realised that maybe there's a lot of things in my life that I need to get rid of. And maybe God is like a lecturer who's telling me to remove these things. But I'm reluctant to remove them because of the time and effort I spent on them, because removing these things would mean accepting that my time and effort didn't have any meaningful, positive impact. But I think even if the time and effort was wasted externally, I think it still creates an impact, even if the impact is only intrinsic.
I think sometime in the past I realised that maybe the things I thought I was doing right are actually wrong. Maybe running away wasn't the smartest thing to do, although it was the only thing I knew to do at the time and seemed for the best. Maybe I've spent so much time and effort in running away and trying to forget that I don't want to give it up now because of the time and effort I've spent trying. Maybe trying to reconcile differences now might lead to nothing more than history repeating itself again.

I don't usually blog about God very often, but I think I should. At the very least, he should deserve more mention than my lecturer. :P

On an unrelated note, collected my third roll of film shot in New Zealand today, and I thought it was the best roll of black and white film I'd ever shot. :D