Skip to main content

I Think I'm Afraid of Art

For a little while now I've been feeling a bit empty. Part of it is the overarching malaise of living in 2018 America. Part of it is being at a crossroads in life and not knowing which way to turn. Part of it is because it's been 90+ degrees outside for most of the past month. There's not really a great answer to all of it, but it's happening.

But one of the things that I keep thinking about is how I think I'd like to start drawing. Or painting. Or something. I want to make visual art, but I'm completely terrified of it. What's more, I don't think I consider my own artistic pursuits to be "good" enough to actually pursue. I explored this idea a little bit on an Instagram post where I edited a photo, and it has kept me thinking further about this.

With words, I don't have any issues with confidence, and that means I don't second-guess what I said. Even if I say something that pisses people off, I have confidence in the fact that I (most of the time) have measured my words and said what I meant to say. But with visual things, I don't have that. I'm so scared of making a crappy drawing that I can't even put the writing utensil to the paper. I can't beat the judge that is living in my head and heart.

Somehow, even if I don't plan on showing someone the thing that I draw, I'll judge it so harshly that I'll just throw it away before I even "finish" (although it'll never be finished because I'll never be satisfied with what has come out).

Why should I feel this way? Why should art scare me? I understand that expression is, at its core, some type of vulnerability, but I don't understand why one form or another should induce crippling fear when the other feels A-OK. There's a mental block at play, and mental blocks suck.

The other thing about visual art is that it doesn't have to be colloquially "good" to matter. How many times have you been to a modern/contemporary art museum (classical art tends to be more about form or portraits or whatever [in my relatively limited experience, anyway]) and thought "boy...I don't understand what I'm looking at." A lot of times, right? But the person who made it felt good, complete, whole, or satisfied with that piece. There are people who sell their art on Etsy that, when I look at it, I think "boy, that's not what a person looks like and it looks like this was drawn in 10 seconds." But people buy it, and the artist was done with it.

There's value in that certainty and that acceptance of your own limitations, and yet it's something that I haven't quite been able to wrap my head around - in the visual realm anyway.

In some way, it's therapeutic to just put this on paper, even if it's not as therapeutic as putting art on paper. Of course, art is subjective, so maybe I'm one step ahead of myself. In either case, expression, which I've already referred to as vulnerability, is also art.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I Have to Write about Basketball

I have about an hour to write out my thoughts about the NBA Finals since I didn't want to at 1 a.m. and I have to be at work soon (and I'll be there for a longer-than-normal day). So here goes. 1) Everyone wants to talk about Steph Curry, and everyone should  be talking about Steph Curry. I don't get it. He's the best shooter in NBA history - although Klay Thompson is hot on his heels - and yet there's something amiss at surprising times. I don't believe in "clutch" the way a lot of people do, because if Steph doesn't hit a million threes all the time, the Warriors are never in position for him to take a game-winner in the Finals (they also don't make the Finals). All of them are worth three points, so they need the first one as much as they need the last one. But something kind of happens, doesn't it? And doesn't it affect his legacy a tiny bit? Steph shot 34.3% on three-pointers this series. Toronto was all over  him defensivel...

Vienna Christmas, part 1

When I last left you, the two Koniecznys were about to arrive and we were going to do...well, something. And a week later we were all going to Vienna for Christmas to see some of my family members who live there (one of them is Norbert, who you might remember from canyoning). Carly and her mom got in on Sunday and we just kinda hung out the first day or two, but they wanted to see the sights and took off to see some nearby things and places, which is something they might tell you about if they were blogging but I don't think they are. Anyway, the real excitement started at the end of the week. Carly and her mom took an overnight train to Vienna on Thursday/Friday and Jenna and I had to wait until Saturday to go. We took a two-layover train; once in Verona to turn to the north and then a second stop in Innsbruck to switch onto an Austrian (OBB) train that would swoop through southeastern Germany en route to Vienna. It was a nearly 12 hour day of trains and, believe it or not, it...

New Year's Eve

One thing that seems to be a true worldwide phenomenon is the realization that my last name is used on New Year's Eve signs around the globe. At first I felt slighted, as if someone were cheapening the worth of my last name. In more recent years I've taken is as a weird sort of compliment and even occasionally tried to make it into a pseudo-attention-getting thing if I'm feeling very "look at me" on a particular day. But that's not what I'm supposed to tell you about because that's boring. What's not boring is that most of the big cities around the world do big exciting fireworks displays and celebrations that stretch way beyond a ball dropping down a pole and standing in a crowd of 500,000 people for nine hours. In short, New Year's in the states generally blows. In the northern US you either go overpay by insane amounts to go to a bar and then wait for three hours for a cab back home or you go to a friend's house and it's...fine. ...