Are you hard on your creative self too?
a missive in which I find myself in art I thought was too whimsical to be wanted; prob feel the same about myself.
unraveling, unmoored
Why are we so hard on ourselves?
I’ve been drawing a few years now, and these are some of my first experiments. I’d written them off as too whimsical to be wanted.
I got into book arts a decade ago or more, and started a journey into skill-building that opened my world up.
I felt capable for the first time I can remember. I think it was being around all those hefty cast iron board shears and nipping presses and using tools in general.
I sometimes wondered if this is what men feel like when they use a power drill, which I’ve not done much of, but I will say I do feel quite powerful when using one. (And also nervous, how does a stud finder work, seriously? Just kidding. No really?)
Most of my cohort had backgrounds in art and printmaking. Admittedly, I frequently felt inadequate and defensively declared, “I’m a writer,” at awkward intervals, hoping to validate my place there.
But a silly little urge crept up on me: I felt drawn to draw.
It’s not the first time I had a desire, my MFA thesis included child-like drawings (because my hand was indeed child-like). They started coming to me while sitting on a bench in Prague, watching a tram pass. But I didn’t recognize it as any kind of bigger urge.
I learned about book binding and book arts back then, in my writing MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For some reason, I avoided the actual binding classes offered, but at the tail end of our program, after browsing various displays of book sculptures, I asked a friend to walk me through a binding. (Of course, I chose the most complicated case binding of the two she offered. A Secret Belgian binding. Give it a try with this tutorial.)
While there, however, I took a sound art class and a performance workshop in Prague and started to vaguely explore text art, but had a real block on what that even was (spoiler, it’s so much stuff). I had two group exhibitions as well as my writing work.
At some point in all of this, I scanned all my old journals and found my 8th-grade art portfolio.
To my absolute shock, my journals were filled with doodles, and my portfolio was all right. I mean. I remembered the clay man I made that my teacher made me make more defined, where I wanted him to be more of a blob, a ghost, sad, water-like, though glazed a dark red.
I don’t think she realized that it was my vision driving me, not that I was incapable of sculpting a more man-looking man.
I found him in three pieces under my sister’s bed alongside my very first diary when my parents were moving out of our house in ~2001 (I was 19). I was so devastated and so resigned, I didn’t even attempt to glue him together again and just threw him away.
I also remembered the clay vase I made from a mold that got wonky because I decided to imprint with a pattern after I’d taken the mold out. No, it did not hold water, but it did stand.
I did not, however, remember that I’d done a linocut that I quite like or that I’d done a big still-life pencil drawing of my fave stuffed friends.
Once I found them, I vaguely remembered getting help on the pair of hands that are far too accurate a likeness to be mine alone.
I had no idea that I’d ever matted and mounted anything before my college photography class. Oh yeah. There’s photography, too.
I didn’t take an art class after 8th grade. I sang and played euphonium and danced, but no art. And I convinced myself the last 20 yrs, for some reason, that I wasn’t a visual person and that I couldn’t draw, while failing to notice that my writings were full of imagery.
And of course, failing to understand that drawing is training the hand to make shapes and to make what it sees. And art is training the eye to see.
I’m glad I didn’t get a BFA, I would have learned a lot of the basic skills and tools that I’ve had to pick up ad hoc and still feel insecure about, but for so long, my insecurity overtook my writing and still hampers my progress.
And I think the same would have happened for my visual work if I hadn’t come back to it now in play and curiosity rather than deadlines and critique and believing there was some measure to live up to.
But it is kind of a lot.
It’s kind of a lot to find myself finally under all these layers of fear and insecurity. To find all this work I’d forgotten about and unfinished poems and thousands of photographs and so so so so much evidence that despite what I’ve been telling myself, I am indeed a visual person and I am indeed creative.
Like my soul was always calling me to make stuff, I just had to make it without looking. I had to make it accidentally.
Slant-wise.
Make a few lines and circles over here. Leave a comment that becomes a poem over there. Write an email that happens to be an essay. And all of the photos. I’m not kidding. All of the photos. What do I even do with them?
It’s difficult to turn on the TV (even to watch shows I like) right now or read others’ work because there’s just so much material to work with. There are too many things to make, and I get overloaded and anxious consuming. But I’m also so overwhelmed by all the things there are to make, all this self-discovery, that I can’t really take it all in, and sometimes I can’t move.
I became this person by accident, despite my best efforts to have in place something more conventional, and much safer, like a real job, and now it feels there’s no other option but to be myself without a net. Stumbling as I go.
with gratitude,
invitation to guest post
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, shares his poetry writing process. Bells ring in his chest, folks.have I not written about my junior high art portfolio before now? this is the closest i found
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Okay this really resonates and I'm wondering if I want to do more creating and that's why I want to avoid consuming right now. This really moved me. Thank you for sharing it.
"I became this person by accident" is a testimony. I think of the oft repeated quote "Man meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it." Jonah in the belly of the beast as well, spit up after 3 days and promising to do his best now going forward.