Chocolate Brownie with grape and strawberry frosting....Which fell on the floor

Erm, Yes I did go to Art University and I have a BA (fine arts painting).... Not something I'm really proud of though... well then again, the entire course was conducted in Vietnamese. 

So I have been working on several silicone projects and bought myself a whole bunch of casting plaster, the type that dentists use.

So by adding water to the plaster it creates an exothermic reaction meaning that things get really hot and as the water evaporates it dries up and becomes really hard and light.

Now that my project was complete I decided to paint with plaster. Mixing dyes into the powder and then adding water to it blending the mixture with more powder to create tones. 

It was not what I had expected. I was expecting it to work like cement but no it dried up really fast. It tried as quickly as I poured it but I was not going to let the plaster go to waste and so I kept working on it.

It was a huge mess and since I had dyes, I just kept mixing it up and kept pouring it on. Scratching, squishing, trying to get organic shapes out of the mess and it was a very difficult medium to work with. When it was done it reminded me of brownies with a grape frosting on top... I guess…

Then I put the plaster painting upright, took a few steps backwards and...nope…  it still looked like crap

However when I laid on the table and looked at it from a side angle it reminded me of Chinese traditional ink landscape paintings of mountains. The pinks and purples and whites blended up together and formed the mesmerizing mist which would flow through the mountains during dawn….

I was getting inspired and with each turn a different perspective created a new experience. When I usually look at a painting I would look at the technical abilities of the artist and how they play with composition light color, and then finally I would allow the painting to speak to me, trying to see how it became an inspiration to the artist who created it.

This plaster painting was different, it was tickling my sense of creativity and imagination trying to work out the shapes and see how it would interpret. At a particular angle it would look like a snow covered mountain peak but with a little twist with my head raised it would look like limestone karst mountains of Halong bay. My friends enjoyed spending time looking at the painting letting their imagination run wild. 

I guess the crap I created heading now served another purpose in bringing out a childlike curiosity and imagination to the viewers who see it. I think that's how art should be, not simply an expression of an artist's muse or emotion but rather immerse the viewer in an experience in which they would create ideas and thoughts and images in their own minds.