Jaron Seth Bloshinsky / Jazz Jennings / I Am Jazz - Puberty Blockers: Not Even Once

Just trying to take a strength-based approach here, does that top left painting show any promise, even if rudimentary for an adult?
No. He used a digital program to achieve the effect. There’s no understanding of how and why. It looks like a breast implant floating on the water.

If Jazz gets any sort of enjoyment or relief out of creating art, more power to him. Art doesn’t have to be perfect or even good, and often it’s the process of creating itself that is the reward.

But his work is on such a low level for an art student, it’s really embarrassing that a) Harvard is allowing him to graduate with a visual arts degree and b) apparently Jazz doesn’t know any better. Harvard isn’t even a big visual art school, but the overall caliber of student it brings in will be so far ahead of where Jazz is, it’ll be obvious to them as well.

I’m adding some artwork featured on the Scholastic website. The Scholastic Art & Writing awards are the big national creative arts award available to high school students in the US. The artists who did these works are 14-16.
IMG_8565.jpegIMG_8566.jpegIMG_8567.jpeg
This is a sample of what the top high school artists are putting out. Even if they aren’t going to Harvard themselves, I will bet Harvard students will likely know this level of work from their peers. And these are not digital pieces, but actual paintings and drawings.
 
Agree - I’m a professional visual artist and he shows absolutely no skill or understanding of any artistic principles. I don’t understand how he can get to this point and clearly not even have watched YouTube videos on the basics of proportion or light or figure drawing. The digital stuff he is putting out is awful - there is so much you can do with digital tools now and his stuff looks like he is using ms paint.

He clearly has all the time, resources and enthusiasm for making art but absolutely no competency or drive to refine and learn how to improve. I’m glad that he has a creative outlet for what he’s been through but it makes me angry when there are so many talented young artists who don’t get this opportunity.
 
THANK YOU so much for the previous page+ of comments. A while ago this thread was going through some kind of Jazz coddle-fest regarding his attempts at "artwork." Yes, yes, we should all be able to express ourselves and have fun and have creative outlets etc etc, and yes, we all feel sorry for this mutilated drugged child abuse victim.

But this is a college student displaying his art and writings in a very public way. And it is truly and alarmingly bad.

This is what happens when people hugbox you all your life, and it was gross to see farmers keep doing it, regardless of how sorry you feel for the kid.
 
Agree - I’m a professional visual artist and he shows absolutely no skill or understanding of any artistic principles. I don’t understand how he can get to this point and clearly not even have watched YouTube videos on the basics of proportion or light or figure drawing. The digital stuff he is putting out is awful - there is so much you can do with digital tools now and his stuff looks like he is using ms paint.
In the hands of a person with enough talent and patience, MS Paint can look like this:
Ezl10jDWEAQPvZ0.jpg
 
In the hands of a person with enough talent and patience, MS Paint can look like this:
View attachment 6143318
In the hands of a talented person, anything can be transformed in beautiful art, even using only a basic pencil.

Jazz, aside from not being very talented -or at all- has always had people praising his mediocrity. He puts up a few rainbows and mermaids and his family not only think he's Picasso, they think is an important piece of art because it's political. Like, wasn't a tail he did in the Smithsonian or something? Once you have your kindergarten level art there, what else is to improve?


He probably thinks it’s super deep too.
His art is as deep as his vagina.
 
To get better, you first have to be able to see that your work is bad. There's a reason they used to start art education by making students copy other works. Even the biggest retard can look at painting A and painting B and tell if they look the same. Back in the day, you did a hell of a lot of that kind of rote work before you even began to inject your own ideas into it.

To be honest, though, I'm always more shocked at his poetry. It is genuinely like the work of a nine-year-old.
 
To be honest, though, I'm always more shocked at his poetry. It is genuinely like the work of a nine-year-old.
To write prose, you need to have a good vocabulary. I suppose it's even more for poetry, as you need to know words that have good rhythm (not necessarily to rhyme). Does Jazz give the vibe that he's someone with a good vocabulary?
 
To write prose, you need to have a good vocabulary. I suppose it's even more for poetry, as you need to know words that have good rhythm (not necessarily to rhyme). Does Jazz give the vibe that he's someone with a good vocabulary?
There's having a good vocabulary and then there's being a good writer.

I'm reminded of this famous fight:

Among his comments, Faulkner stated that Hemingway “has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to a dictionary.” Upon hearing of Faulkner’s words, Hemingway reportedly retorted, “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
 
THANK YOU so much for the previous page+ of comments. A while ago this thread was going through some kind of Jazz coddle-fest regarding his attempts at "artwork." Yes, yes, we should all be able to express ourselves and have fun and have creative outlets etc etc, and yes, we all feel sorry for this mutilated drugged child abuse victim.

But this is a college student displaying his art and writings in a very public way. And it is truly and alarmingly bad.

This is what happens when people hugbox you all your life, and it was gross to see farmers keep doing it, regardless of how sorry you feel for the kid.

Some of the stuff Jazz posted as a 13 year old isn't terrible for that age, it's exactly what you'd expect from a kid making their first serious attempt at art on their own without anybody having ever taught them the fundamentals, done all kinds of practice exercises, or anything else that artists generally need to know if they ever want to reliably produce anything decent. At its best Jazz's art is very basic and entry-level, but for a totally new and clueless 13 year old winging it, I can look at some of those sketches and say that kid might have the potential to be good if they were given proper instruction and put in the work. A few years of Harvard art classes proved me dead ass wrong, mind you, but I stand by my initial impression. How much of it is puberty blockers and antipsychotics handicapping his mental acuity in ways beyond his control and how much of it is just apathy and laziness, it's hard to say.

Someone linked his deviantart earlier in the thread somewhere, I don't think anyone considered it worth archiving but there are only a few tiny low quality images on it anyway with nothing else of note, I'll dump the images here for posterity.

271517f2090911e2b18c12313d051969_6_by_jazz2453_d5zz1l5-fullview.pngd5je1eb-908b29c7-0cec-4e44-97cf-4e0a91e61d95.pngd5je27h-85231a3b-0a81-44b4-984e-bb33ac8c0b06.pngd758jec-845c1b4e-4ff6-41ae-9fed-e6f7ba3e5f35.pngeye_by_jazz2453_d6z2cjx-fullview.pngmy_first_customer__pencil_portrait__by_jazz2453_d5zz2in-fullview.pngphoto_on_3_27_13_at_6_56_pm__3_by_jazz2453_d5zhiwc-fullview.pngpride_eye_by_jazz2453_d5zz36q-fullview.pngtaylor_swift__by_jazz2453_d5zz2ws-fullview.png

If he actually created that mermaid tail himself, like designed the pattern and used the sewing machine to handcraft it, I'd say it was impressive for a young teenager. However, I feel pretty safe assuming that someone else did almost the entirety of the work. Similarly, the underwater photo is kind of interesting and I rather like it, but I'd be very surprised if Jazz actually rigged up some kind of underwater tripod and managed to get this shot after much trial and error.

As for the poetry, there is literally no excuse I could possibly make for how fucking abysmal it is. I'd go so far as to say it's just as embarrassing as the shit Sander does. Sander is, ostensibly, a competent adult and could maybe get his shit together if he was ridiculed to his face more often, but if someone tried that approach with Jazz it would just be blown off as transphobia and disregarded entirely. That said, it's actually cruel that nobody around Jazz cares enough to gently explain to him that his poetry is absolute garbage, publishing it makes him look retarded, and given his age and supposed level of education he is badly embarrassing himself. I mean, maybe phrase it a little nicer than that but you get the idea.
 
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