BLOG TWO
While there are many current popular trends on Tik Tok, my favorite one to watch is “Yeah art doesn’t affect me”. This is a trend that starts off with a song, and in the first sentence of the song, the person will say, “Yeah art doesn’t affect me”. When the second sentence begins they will show a piece of art that has affected them in some form. I love it more when they explain the artwork or piece in depth so we all can understand its reasoning for being so impactful.
There has been a lot of really impactful art out there that people posted. The first one I saw that hit harder is an art piece from a girl name Quin Han. Many artist know Qinni from her artwork on Instagram, but she is most famous for this artwork meme.

Qing was a freelance artist that used mostly watercolor in her drawings. She had a genetic heart condition and went through four open heart surgeries between 2015 and 2018. She spent those year using art as a coping mechanism and posted them on her media’s along with updates of her life. At the end of December (the 30th) of 2019, she was told she has stage 4 Fibrosis Sarcoma cancer and that she had about a year and a half to live. She passed away February 8, 2020. Qinni is known for her goldfish and glowing stars, when people see them in art many think about her.

If I was to do this “yeah art doesn’t affect me” trend. My response would be this song called An American Elegy by Frank Ticheli.
A little backstory on me: I have always had my passion in music, a lot of my childhood and being is centered around music. I was a choir kid and switched to band in seventh grade, I stayed in band up to my first two years of college. I was going to pursue music and be a music major; I also wanted my parents to be proud of me. With my mom naysay, I stopped playing music. A lot of things went downhill from there, leading to me quitting college, started working. I think my mom noticed the impact of events or was uncomfortable seeing me in the state I was in. She signed me up for the concert band at our local community center.
Being in the band was short lived, but I have pleasant memories there. I remember this one day we receive a new song and we were sight reading it, and there was a trumpet solo. And the trumpets first two notes took me to a place I went to with my church.
We were on a mission trip to Ciudad AcuƱa, Mexico (August 2013) to build a shed size home for each family (we worked with two families in need of a house). We drove all the way there and one of our stops was in Oklahoma at a memorial called The Field of Empty Chairs.

Each chair is a person that was killed in the Federal Building Bombing: 168 chairs in total, 19 smaller chairs represent children. This trumpet solo took me to this place of empty chairs. More specifically, it shows me an image of a tree at the memorial that watches over the field. It is called The Survivor Tree and it is an American elm, it withstood the bombing and is now the symbol of resilience.
It took me to this tree in the early morning, just as the sun was coming up and there was a little boy with his trumpet and he standing near the ledge, playing this trumpet solo, overlooking all these chairs, these people (for anyone curious, the solo starts at 8:10 on the video above, ends ~9:15).

But I just started crying. Which was crazy to me because yes I was sad there, but never felt an urge to cry. But in that moment I was so moved and mournful. I can’t quite describe what I felt other than it felt real and peaceful in a place so heavy.
But it is a wonderful piece; I expect nothing less from Frank Ticheli. He is a great composer, I have loved all his pieces. I later found out that Ticheli composed An American Elegy to commemorate the lives lost in the 1999 Columbine Shooting. That was mind blowing to me; I should have known it from the title so I’m just slow.
So this would be my “art has never affected me before” artwork, definitely an art piece I hold close to my heart.