Now I know how Lebron James must have felt during the Finals.  I’m currently in my thesis year and I’ll be sure to tell you what it is, as soon as I know for myself.  I’ve spent the last three weeks getting the crap kicked out of my thought processes and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight.  What frustrates me the most is how starkly unprepared for this my university “education” has made me.

It is a point of GREAT irony that here at OCAD U, from the day you walk through the front doors, you’re being told “we’re training you to think like designers and preparing you for what thesis holds”.  There is a fair bit of truth to that, in that I certainly have experienced change in the way I think about creative solutions for a given problem or mechanism.  However, what these voices have overlooked and failed to express is that in an illustration thesis, you get no mechanism.  While the graphic designers and the advertisers are all thesis-prepping away in third year, being primed and geared up for what fourth year brings, we illustration students have received the blessing (sarcasm) of a two glorified powerpoint viewings and a handout on what to think up over the summer.

Now, this may just be me alone in this struggle (and it’s not) but it doesn’t change the fact that the disadvantage I find myself faced with is one created by poor departmental bureaucracy.  While I was being forced to take a gazillion hours of redundant observational drawing/painting classes (illustrative, my backside), I feel like that time would have been better utilised in some art directorial courses; gearing us up to come up with crazy and wild frameworks in which to execute technical ability.  Because that’s the curse I’m faced with, isn’t it?  I can’t get a thesis proposal approved because I have zero idea what passes for “conceptual” when forced to make up a project.

My other beef comes with the overplacement of value on conceptual thinking (whatever that means anymore).  Not that it’s bad to have conceptual thinking; in fact, I consider this breed of creativity one of the greatest assets in an illustrator’s arsenal.  However, when it becomes all-too-apparent that you can be a rockstar with a great idea but no ability to execute aesthetic to match, I have a problem.  I’ve worked damn hard to be able to draw as well as I can now (and I will continue to work hard so I can become even better).  Granted, I don’t want to be just a mindless production drone, but I take offence to the fact that I’m not being allowed to showcase my technical ability as part of the concept (ask me about it in person and maybe I’ll explain it better).  There needs to be a balance and to not have faith in my knowledge of what I’m capable of on both ends is silly.

Perhaps I’m just tired though.  Perhaps I’ve just lost sight of how close I am to an approval.  Perhaps choking in the fourth quarter isn’t all I’m destined for.  It’s still early, yet, and I like Lebron James.