Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Cookies: A Junior Self-Portrait Diptych by Patrick McClellan (2011)

I am stressed but simple. I wonder what it would be like to be a child again. I hear voices clouding my mind. I see numbers, letters, words, thoughts, all spinning around me. I want effortless success. I am stressed but simple. I pretend to manage my problems with ease. I feel like throwing in the towel sometimes. I touch my pen to my paper. I worry that things taught in high school won't all be useful in real life. I cry when I see people break down under the pressures of adolescence. I am stressed but simple. I understand complaining won't change anything. I say I can control how I react to external problems. I dream about being a toddler. I try to bring myself back to that blissful time period. I hope to achieve an easier-going, slower, mindset. I am stressed but simple. The first idea of the diptych is that when I was young, I had simplicity, and a plain, happy lifeIt was just me, my family, and my desires- those were the only things I'd had enough time to comprehend in life so far. The right side shows what childhood was like, simple, and without distractions or stress. The left side depicts a typical night for me: homework to complete, books to read, and an overall lack of organization. Clearly, the evident simplicity that was present in my childhood is gone now. My use of cookies also represents what my desires actually were when I was a toddler, and how they changed as I got older. When I was little, I always remember wanting to grow up faster. The lifestyle of my superiors seemed much more attractive than the one I had at the time, and the lone cookie on the right represents my age. The left side shows me when I am a teenager, so the cookies have multiplied several times. Having this many cookies as a toddler would blow my mind, however, as a teen, I have way too many things to worry about rather than to appreciate those cookies.
Visitors 980