Hey FMW
I am having serious font issues, so apologies if this is crazy big writing - I have no idea why its doing this, and nothing I do will make it go back to normal again!
Anyways - oh boy did your post ring a chord with me. All my life I've felt artistically inclined, and yet everything I put my hand to can be described as 'artistically challenged' at best! I apologise in advance for the babblefest...
Like you Ive tried a variety of arty things in the past - oil and water colours, drawing, photography, glass painting. I tried it all, and without fail everything I did was just awful - humiliatingly bad. It all came to a head decades ago, when I did a craft stall with an (actually arty) friend - she sold everything, made hundreds. I sold one extremely small item. It was one of the most humiliating days of my life. I went home, threw everything I had even vaguely connected to art in to the bin, and haven't tried it since.
I still think about all this sometimes. My frustrations at nothing I do turning out how I wanted it to. The anger it brings out in me, the despair, the tears! Over the last year Ive been in T, which has me making a million new connections too:
- It took me ten years of lessons to reach grade 8 standard piano. Now, I can pick up Bethoven and play it, and make it sound ok. I am still clearly no virtuoso, and a 'proper' musician would find it very very very easy to pull apart. But to the untrained ear, it would sound ok. And yet I expect to pick up a pencil, or paintbrush, or spray can, and produce a Michael Angelo on my first attempt. There are techniques to learn, skills, practise. Hours and hours of practise - and yet here I am arrogant enough to think I should be *that* good without any effort. Of course, savants do exist - but for the common or garden person ... - I need to have realistic expectations of my capabilities, and I need to put the time and effort in to learning how to be good at it.
- As a kid, my mum encouraged me to do paintings and drawings, because it kept me quiet for a couple of hours. She rarely showed any interest in the output, and she never ever joined me. Im guessing there is some unresolved mum stuff going on here.
- Since quitting, Ive met a few people who have gone through art school. What seems to make the artist isn't necessarily the appearance of the art. Lets face it, there are some pretty crazy 'art' pieces out there! What makes the artist, is the story behind the art. The emotions and the feelings. I was trying to create a picture - what I should have been doing is trying to express something - put emotions in to the picture, and express emotions whilst creating it. What I was doing, was a bit like a robot - I had a picture in my head I was trying to re-create, but I wasn't channeling emotions through my hands in to the paper. Now I have this idea of just covering the floor with a huge piece of paper, have lots of different paints near by, get nekkid, cover myself in paint, and just scream and rant and punch the floor, get drunk, and scream and rant and punch the floor and kick the floor some more and just totally go ape s**t on the paper. I reckon I would love the result no matter what it looked like, or what anyone thought of it
- And of course, the most recent realisation of all is the most humiliating... With hindsight it is so bloody obvious that it was a very young me producing much of the 'art'! Utterly mortifying. Explains why sometimes I would produce something passable, and other days I would make something that looked like a three year old did it. *sigh*. I cannot believe I missed that one, because looking back its *really* obvious.
