Under the Influence

Watch the video at the link below (the quality is a little better) or the one in the post.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRVts7TFw-Y



Some Mondays ago I got sick with a fever so I stayed home. Besides taking tylenol cold, downing lots of fluids, and figuring out what I was going to eat for lunch, I went on youtube to watch Naruto. Before I could type in the episode I was searching for, I noticed a picture from a showcased video on the homepage. It appeared to be of a man's chest with a painted picture of a lady on it. Interesting, I thought, so I clicked on it to watch. Five minutes of video covered over twenty hours worth of painting. The artist used his chest and stomach areas as a canvas and painted people or objects that represented people who influenced him. He used white, black, red, yellow, blue, green, grey, and orange, but mostly white and black. Although he could have incorporated many colors in each painting he mainly stuck to one background color and one design color. The plainness really brought focus to what he was painting. I have to say that I was amazed at the quality of the artwork and even more impressed that each was drawn upside down. The creativity was pretty defining of what it means to be creative: using the body instead of paper or canvas, layering each painting one atop the other, and finally pulling all the layers off as one and cutting out a silhouette of himself and laying the two parts of the cut paint layers on black so it looked like he was staring back at himself. That last image struck me because that rectangular window of paint that made the cut-outs represented the 30 people who influenced him. The section that went around his head seemed to represent that the 30 people were external influences from the outside that continue to affect him. The section that was his head seemed to show that he is who he is because of those 30 people and that he would not be the same person if they had not come into his life. I don't know what the artist's intentions were when he painted, but it makes me wonder what I would be like if I did not meet one of the 30 people who influenced me the most. I doubt that I would be the same person, but just how different would I be? I suppose it depends which influential person I removed because if it was one of my parents then, yeah, I would be a completely new person because they've shaped me a lot, but if it was an iconic musician or author, that's very different. First of all, I never met any of the musicians or authors who's work I admire. Since I never met anyone, it's not actually THE musician or THE author who affected me, it's really their songs or their books (and the characters in them), although it is fair to say that what they produce depicts a part of who they are.

I find it funny that youtube lists this as the 39th most viewed video in "Film & Animation-English," when there is no English spoken. I think the lack of spoken language makes this a video that can be appreciated by anyone anywhere.