warning: I write the way I speak
Identity as an Artist
I was listening to the lyrics “Born this Way” and I thought, it really is so important to discover who you really are. But I don’t hear much about how to do this. How do you discover your identity?
I once read that the answer to every question is “love”.
What do you love?
1. What do you do naturally?
2. What are you good at?
3. What can you do forever and not get tired?
4. What do you enjoy doing?
5. What makes you leap out of bed?
6. What can you eat everyday and never get tired of it?
7. Basically, what makes you feel alive? What turns you on?
Do more of the above!
The problem with so many people today is that they like things just because other people love them. They don’t follow their own dreams. They don’t even know what they want.
One day my friend told me her young daughter wanted to be a painter. This little girl is forced to study hard every day and made to feel guilty when she plays (she’s 7). Regarding being an artist, my friend told her daughter “You’ll live poor and you’ll be rich once you’re dead.” I bit my lip, but thought: Wow, really??? In my world, the most successful people are artists in some way…..those who use their creative powers on a daily basis; singers, song writers, authors. The rest are those that know what they love and monetize what they do naturally. Her daughter just discovered what she wants, and it’s being written off, even degraded. I know why my friend says this. It’s because she can’t even imagine her kids being ultra successful, she’ll be happy if her daughter is able to just get by. It’s so sad to me that so many parents are putting such limits on their children…..most have no idea what children are capable of. And so, this world is full of children who grow up believing they can’t do what they love, that they have to settle for a “job” that will pay the bills. They soon forget what it is they really love in the first place. They forget who they really are.
For me, being an artist is like being on a path back to where I belong. I’m in the process of discovering my own artistic “voice” on paint. It is a process, a long one for me. I’ve been steered the wrong way for a long time. Even though I was a rebel, still am, I still had the mentality of wanting to please people. I was a pre-med in college. I was told for a long time I needed to be a doctor. I did really well in school but I also did really well in art. But since art was considered “play”, I was never encouraged to follow that path. College was a dread for me. I loved to learn but I hated memorizing anything. I also hated busy work. Some days I would just tell my professor that I didn’t believe in busy work and would not turn in my papers. They didn’t know what to do with me. I skipped as many days as I could get away with. I once had an upset biology professor pull me out of class and told me she would fail me because I was absent for half of her classes. I reminded her that I also had the highest grade in her class, so apparently I attended as much as I needed to. She gave me this bewildered look and I ended getting an A. There were a couple of times I would walk into class and found out we had an exam that day. So I would walk out again. Needless to say I didn’t like school very much.
Except for some of my electives like art class. Art history was a bore, I would not have made it as an art critic. But the drawing and paint classes were fun! I would totally go into my zone when creating art pieces. The only problem was I was not inspired by any of my peers’ work, or the art hanging around me. I was used to being challenged and because art was an “easy A”, I didn’t take it seriously back then.
The one pre-requisite for med school that I did not pass was Organic Chemistry. It was a weed-out class and I’m glad it weeded me out. I would have died in medical school. I decided to major in Psychology instead and breezed through it. I majored in Biology and Psychology but didn’t know what to do with it after I graduated. I had no idea what I wanted to do!
Looking back I think everything worked out perfectly. The study of Life and the study of the Mind ended up affecting my art and my life in every way. For the past 5 years I’ve been devouring every book I could get a hold of on these two subjects. The study of the Mind, led me to discover my other side, the spiritual side. It was a side that I had been blocking out because I thought it was mostly superstition and secondhand anecdotes forced on me. I had been walking around being only half of what I really was. But in 2006 right after I had my first daughter, I had an awakening. She was the catalyst. When she was born, the world I lived in was imperfect, not safe, not fair, and it made me angry. Angry enough to demand to God (if He existed) that He needs to make it safe, perfect, fair. I told Him it was his job. How can this baby, or any baby, deserve anything less?
Ask and ye shall receive. It is now 2011, I have evolved so much, made so many internal changes, embraced the spiritual side of life. I now really do live in a safe, perfect, and fair world. It’s the same world…..my perception of it has changed.
How does the Mind have anything to do with this? Well….everything exists in the mind, your consciousness. Can anyone disagree with this? Without the mind there is nothing. And the mind is powerful, so powerful. I’ll write more on this later.
And how does biology, the study of life, affect me now? Not in the way I thought it would. It directed my art! The golden ratio, that magical fraction that determines beauty….that is one of the magical ratios of life, of nature. The Fibonacci sequence.....also another mathematical sequence of life. The nautilus shell, the spiral of the galaxies, a ram’s horn……all these things move and grow in a particular pattern determined by these magic numbers.
But I’m no longer interested in studying complex numbers. I’m lazy and I'd rather learn by osmosis. My favorite thing to do is to be outdoors, walk in the grass, stare at the stars, gaze at the clouds, breathing in fresh air. And I know now that the patterns of nature can exist in the most unexpected places. This is the reason I am sometimes fixated on dripping water, swirling paint, rust stains. When things move, uncontrolled by man, it moves in nature’s patterns. This is what I do to develop my artistic eye. I just pay attention to things. Not difficult at all!
And what happens when you do that for years and years? Your inner eye, the one that helps you visualize something in your mind, begins to have more vivid visions, more to your liking. But to an inexperienced artist, their skills don’t match the visions. They try to recreate what they see onto the canvas and they get disappointed. That’s been me. So for the past several years, I haven’t painted much but I’ve been experimenting a lot, constantly, with paint, and constantly developing my visions and my techniques.
It is now 9 years since I started painting, and I feel really good about my creations. They are beginning to get closer and closer to what I want them to be. I still get dissatisfied with my paintings, but the occasional sense of elation has been increasing and I hope will one day overshadow any negative feelings. Just this past year, I have gotten much closer, mainly due to me forcing myself to paint freer, more naturally. But I have a feeling I will always have some degree of dissatisfaction….maybe forever, I don’t know.
I will discuss my ultimate goals for my art in a later essay or post. I do have goals!
-JT
Posts
