Angelina Tran- Pilgrimage Pilgrimage (Christiana Guest Speaker)

 For the class of Thursday, April 10th we had the guest speaker Christiana talk about her layered acrylic art and her own pilgrimage. As Christiana talked about pilgrimage, it really got me thinking how much I did not know about pilgrimage. During the guest lecture, I realized that I had a misconception of pilgrimage of only thinking about when pilgrims travelled to new lands to escape religious persecution. This is quite the extreme case when I thought of pilgrimage but was interesting to find out that pilgrimage could also mean something more modern when Christiana gave her story about the pilgrimage. Christiana described her pilgrimage as walking along the Camino de Santiago to escape her negative emotions about herself. Knowing that, the pilgrimage idea was similar to the pilgrims escaping to new lands from religious persecution like how Christiana was escaping “persecution” or driving herself crazy from not proving herself worthy to do a journey like this. 

Along with the pilgrimage, Christiana compared her medium of art, layered acrylic, to her experience on the pilgrimage throughout the lecture. Christiana’s comparison to layered acrylic was quite enticing as art played a major role in my life yet, I have not heard about layered acrylic. To be fair, layered acrylic is as the name suggests but Christiana went into more detail about the medium. Christiana described a scum/scovel layer where it is a more chunky transparent white layer painted over for the colorful layers to “pop” and almost “glow” later. Ironically, Christiana described her experience as sometimes the scum/scovel layer when she acquired mono and injured her leg yet she spoke about this with a smile. These sufferings or the “ugly” layer were needed to realize the relief she would be able to feel after. It is important to note now that Christiana actually did this pilgrimage twice as she felt incomplete after the first pilgrimage. As Christiana described the end of the first pilgrimage, she only reached the middle of the labyrinth and needed to go back to be able to escape the labyrinth and share her journey. Upon hearing this, I could not help but think she just did the hero’s journey part of coming back to tell her story! That is, the climax was that she completed the pilgrimage but there was an epilogue that Christiana was completing for this journey. Christiana now has her art and this lecture is telling what she learned from the pilgrimage from about her perseverance, coping, and what life can be about. Overall, Christiana was a great guest speaker for this class and I am now quite interested in layered acrylic and a slight urge to do a pilgrimage but we shall see what happens. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kip Redick Example of a Blog Post

 Page 4 Michael Taussig would suggest Juan's understanding of the meaning of a place emerges out of the process of an imitation of all the “differences” that we discern there. We mimic (in language and action) the full range of sounds, movements, and other sensory perceptions that come to us from the more than human world.” It’s hard to put a place that strikes us as sublime into mere words; we can try to describe it as a feeling and try to put language to that feeling, but sometimes the feeling of the beauty of nature or the power of a sacred space is too big to try to translate or make sense of. Would every place and experience be subjective, and would the discourse be the same? Would the mountain top make me feel the same as another? Or does my personal experience with the natural world and divine keep it intimate/ unique, or would my experience be relatable enough? The author uses the messiness, ambiguity, and mystery of people's deeply personal experience of ...
Read more

Rose Baker - Herbert's "Dune" and Martyrs

  In class, we talked about Jesus and Christianity as an example of myth. Myths and martyrs are dangerous to systems of control because even if they’re suppressed, they can survive and grow stronger. They last because they’re tied to belief, memory, and emotion---things you can’t fully erase. That’s what makes them more powerful than systems built on forced order or control. Even though much of the early church died gruesome deaths, and were consistently ordered to stop spreading the gospel, the "myth" of Jesus has continued for over 2000 years.      In Frank Herbert's  Dune , we see something similar. The Bene Gesserit know how powerful myths can be, and instead of waiting for one to form naturally, they build one on purpose. Through the Missionaria Protectiva , they plant stories and prophecies across different cultures, preparing the world for someone to fulfill the one part they can't fabricate, the living, breathing "savior" who must be visible and prov...
Read more

Joanah Eresechima - Blue Lock's Exploration of Flow

In the sixth chapter of American Camino , the concept of flow is extensively explained in the context of spiritual walking. It is described as unification of action and awareness to create a state in which thoughts are non-existent. The hiker just moves through the world, extremely aware and focused on the wilderness around them but unable to thoroughly reflect on it in that moment. It is only afterwards that the hiker is able to recall the memories from their flow state. Flow can occur in different types of people like artists, scientists and athletes (Redick 249). I was actually very surprised to see this term in the book because it becomes one of the central components in a manga I read called Blue Lock. The story followed a boy named Isagi Yoichi, a high school soccer player who got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join a soccer program called Blue Lock meant to create the greatest striker in the world. Out of 300 players, he was ranked 299 th , making him one of the weakest p...
Read more