Me, as an Artist

As I continue on my journey, teaching myself to draw and use color, I have come to realize what a true study and discipline art actually is and is meant to be. I am constantly thinking back to art class in grade school and how the discipline of art wasn't really emphasized. It was giving kids colors and a task but either you could draw or you couldn't. You were either good at art or you simply had to tolerate it until you could go on to study real subjects in high school.

I remember in the second or third grade we had an art teacher who went off on a rant at the end of a class when were were tasked with drawing Santa Clause. The teacher may have emphasized that she wanted action in the drawing but didn't really explain what she wanted very well. The thing I remember most about trying to draw this Santa Clause is being stuck on the nose.

Drawing a nose was a big issue for me in my early years of school. Whenever I had to draw a face I would feel my nose and I felt my nostrils and nose formed a sort of soft letter “m” but when ever I tried to represent this, the nose always ended up looking like a pig nose. This was so frustrating to me and I didn't understand I was attempting to represent the most 3-D part of the face on a 2-D plane, and I understood nothing about shading, I doubt I ever heard the word and if I did I certainly didn't understand it.

So, when the teacher was going off on her rant about how all of the Santas were looking static, I was still stuck on the disappointment of having drawn yet another pig nose when the teacher stopped at my desk and held my drawing up as an example of, at least, an attempt to put some action into the drawing because my Santa looked like he was taking a step forward.

Well, this was because I also had trouble drawing symmetrically and I drew one boot in black marker that was smaller than the other boot so it looked like was taking a step forward to my teacher, whereas to me, it just looked like I couldn't draw two sides of a human body that looked the same and I actually felt worse because I was being praised for something I didn't intend to do. And plus, my Santa had a pig nose!

But the good thing about this incident is it had enough of an emotional implication that the memory has stuck with me and while I was reflecting upon this memory, that as incompetent as my drawings at that age were, I was attempting real art. I was attempting to represent a human nose as it was. I studied my own nose and I looked at the noses of my classmate and even though I couldn't not competently reproduce what I was seeing, I was striving.

Had an adult been able to explain this much to me and cleared up some other misconceptions I had picked up on kindergarten (the teacher had said that people had skeletons and we had to draw them not as Popsicle people but we had to include the skeleton, I thought I had to start drawing by drawing a skeleton first, then I drew the skin and then I drew the cloths and while it sounds funny now, I was very stressed out over this as it didn't make any sense to me) then maybe I could have gotten over that hurdle and started drawing a long time ago.

But these are the things we go through in this live. I don't think they are to be regretted. Yes, I would love if I could have been drawing sooner but I recognize that this is life and we are all going at our own pace and if it took me to 50 to make it past this block, well, at least I made it past that block in this lifetime. What else is there to do in life? Nearly everything, and perhaps everything that the culture or society or that very small group that festers within governments and universities that decide for us that which is important as you mastering yourself, overcoming those hurdles and pains that the culture makers have laid inside you in order to make you a more easily controllable citizen.

As you exercise your own discipline to study what you are in this life to study, as you become more of an artist in and of your self, the threat of would-be culture creators diminishes and you become more you without the drawbacks of egotism and narcissism, which are traps laid by the culture creators to keep us more keepable.

When I first started drawing, I was loath to label myself as an artist but through the process of observation, disciplined study, and self-discipline, I have earned that title. I am an artist. Regardless of the scale or skill level, what I produce is art.  If it touches other people, that would be awesome, if I am the only audience that can appreciate my art right now, that just as valuable.  We don't all start out equally nor do we all finish equally but we all have an equal chance of making something that is unique to who we are.  And that is the only equality there can be.