The Romantic Side of an Aspiring Law Student

So far in my studies, I have established that writing and composing are different, but belong together in order to create a text. The writing is the brainpower, the diction, the syntax, and the metaphors that bring ideas to life, but composing is the art of working those ideas together and bringing them to a specific audience. In composing, often times we find this romantic writing-idea called remediation. To me, remediation is the process of using somebody else's text, and redesigning it for a new purpose. It is definitely a whole new use of writing and composing because one is told to take this, use it, play with it, and send it off with something new. For my second major project in WEPO, my goal was to remediate Lady Antebellum's song, Need You Now, into a painting that would emphasize the social issue of imposed gender roles, while simultaneously appealing to those who have recently experienced a breakup. What I find interesting about life is that we have been molded to expect that males and females play certain roles in specific situations. For breakups, the males are supposed to party and find a rebound girl, while the females are expected to eat ice-cream and watch ridiculously romantic movies. For my painting, I chose to exhibit that -like in the song- the female and male are often experiencing the same heartbreak, and have both immobilized themselves.

I feel that a painting is an effective design because I had to find a more creative way to convey emotion than the song already had. Paintings can portray people, their experiences and their feelings by using certain colors and added media, so I felt that this was the best way to show somebody who had recently been through a breakup assurance that their ex-lover’s heart was just as broken. Furthermore, the first time I was asked if I saw my class’ key terms reflected throughout the project, I firmly thought, “No.” Now that I have a greater understanding of these terms through practice, I understand that they are woven throughout the entirety of my composing process. My materials were first thought to simply be paint, but I ended up adding photo clips and pieces of tissues, which changed the entire design. The audience was constantly in mind, so I had to continuously think of ways to further my appeal to them. From this project, I feel that I can draw upon Shipka, because I did have a goal, but the final product drifted so much from my original idea that I ended up learning more from my deviations than anything else. I learned that reuse should be played with like molding clay; ideas are created as the process moves forward, and the design acts as parameters that those ideas must fit into.