What's the Big Idea?

Big Ideas and Artmaking
This article was about the concept of big overarching ideas that govern an artists entire body of work.  The thing I found to be the most interesting about this article was the that they challenged students to find their own big idea.  So instead of just creating to prove mechanical skill, they urge students to find something larger to focus their work on.
I think the most difficult thing for me is going to be trying to find a big idea to focus on.  This is mostly for the fact that I don't have a lot of mechanical skill when it comes to drawing anyway, so taking my work a step farther with a big idea might be too advanced for me. If I can get a grasp of the mechanics of digital art making I may move on to this concept, but for now I'm just going to try to produce work that's technically nice.

Barrett Visual Culture
So this article dealt with the idea of denotations and connotations in a visual piece of artwork.  The idea that everything in a piece of work is meant to be done deliberately in order to elicit some kind of response.  The response doesn't even have to be a conscious one.  It was interesting to see the students pick apart the Rolling Stones cover since I've never thought about really looking at something to the point of noticing the most minute details.
The thing about the article I found most difficult was that now I'm going to be very aware of everything I do in my work. Now I'm going to have to really think about the meaning in all the nuances of a piece of work. This is something I don't really have any experience with so it may not end well.