art is hard

"’Cause we all know art is hard
young artists have gotta starve
Try, and fail, and try again…"
–Cursive, Art is Hard

"Art is not the world, art is in our hearts…"
-Showbread, Stabbing Art to Death

"Let me ask you something, what is not art?"
-Unknown

I used to draw.  A lot.  My childhood was spent with a Slim-Fast in one hand and a pencil in the other.  I often sneaked into my sister’s room and pulled out her charcoal sketches of dragons and Axl Rose she kept underneath her bed.  And I copied them.  I learned about lines and shading sitting on the floor of her room, surrounded by the waxy smell of drugstore makeup and wall-to-wall posters of hair metal bands.

An artist was born.

I devoured sketch pads and ground colored pencils into stumps.  As much as I loved toys, I loved drawing utensils equally.  I couldn’t wait to try a new type of marker or a new color of crayon.  I drew my favorite superheroes and created my own action figures out of paper.  But I was never incredibly creative.  My artistic endeavors were derivative of the enormous amount of Saturday morning cartoon I consumed and my eventual discovery of anime, which I was into way before it became so huge here in America.  I was ahead of the game back then.

I learned to shade and highlight.  I learned about depth and perspective.  All from doing it on my own, from observing, from drawing, from constantly creating.

I was good at copying.  Any attempts to be original were mediocre at best.  But when I was younger, I wasn’t preoccupied with being original or unique.  I just genuinely enjoyed drawing and having fun with it.  I was good.  It gave me pleasure.

But sadness and insecurity crept in and my mind became poisoned and I became a perfectionist.  People noticed my talent and were impressed.  And somehow, people began to inflate my abilities.

"Brannon drew a picture of my daughter and it looks just like her!"

"Brannon doesn’t even use an eraser!"

"I heard Brannon doesn’t need to draw from pictures, or from life.  He can draw from memory!"

"One time, I saw Brannon sneeze on a piece of paper and then when I looked over his shoulder, his snot was in the shape of Mona Lisa!"

None of this is true, of course.  But for some reason, in some people’s minds, I’m better than I actually am.  And that was a part of the insecurity.  I felt I could never measure up to people’s outlandish expectations.  I was my biggest critic.  Eventually, nothing I drew matched the image I had in my head and it frustrated me.  I knew I was better, more capable, but for some reason, I couldn’t translate the image from head to paper.

There were times when I got away with reaching people’s expectations, or at least that’s what they told me.  I did a few commissioned drawings.  But eventually the stress became too much and I stopped charging because my art was not worth anyone’s money.  And eventually I stopped doing drawings for people all together because I couldn’t afford to jeopardize the reputation bestowed upon me by others.  I never lived up to the hype, never went along with the adulation and as much as I tried to downplay what I could do, no one believed me and I suddenly I was a small town art prodigy.  And wanting to please everyone, I didn’t want to produce low-quality work and prove everyone wrong.   

I had been painted into a corner, so to speak.

Art became a source of frustration instead of pleasure and so I stopped drawing as much.  And then I went to college to study art.  No one had any preconceived notions of who I was or what I was capable of and suddenly I was a clean slate, an out of practice clean slate.  And I felt like I was starting from zero while all my classmates were already prodigies themselves.  I was in over my head and terrified I had made a huge mistake.

But I finished college, got a degree, and graduated with honors.  I guess that means something to someone but it doesn’t mean anything to an animation company.  They want to see your demo reel and it doesn’t matter how great your grades were in college, if you don’t deliver mind-blowing art, you’re done.  There’s hundreds of other wide-eyed kids in line behind you who have dedicated themselves to their art.  They didn’t hide behind rumors of grandeur.

I abandoned art after college.  I didn’t feel good about my abilities and wanted to go in a different direction.  I just wasn’t sure about the direction I wanted to go in.

Let me let you in on a little secret I’ve been keeping about my relationship with art: I DON’T FREAKING GET IT.

What is good art?  Who’s to say what is beautiful and what is garbage?  There are so many factors that go into evaluating art, such as technical skill and the message being conveyed.  What is the artist trying to say?  What are they trying to make us feel?  Or are they saying anything at all?  Does art have to have a message to be art?  To know that, you have to define art.  Forget about what is good or bad.  What is art at all?  Is it something that’s beautiful and/or moving or is it the physical representation of an emotion, voice or stirring?  My art history professor in college told the class art is anything that makes people talk.  Pretty general definition.  It didn’t help me narrow down anything.

I never really knew what art meant to me.  Remember, I started out copying my sister’s sketches of Guns N’ Roses.  It was fun.  It didn’t get any deeper or more complicated than that.  I didn’t start out drawing meaning for it to be a form of expression.  And funny enough, when I needed a form of expression, I didn’t use drawing.  I turned to writing for that.

For me, drawing and painting and other creative processes are intimidating because they are so limitless.  Writing feels much more…approachable.  Although there’s been countless books written, it’s all just a different combination of the same twenty-six letters (well, in English of course).  But with other forms of art, there’s drawing and charcoal and paints and sculpture and clay and even urinals.  You can make art from anything and that limitlessness is what scares the crap out of me.  Where do I start?  What do I use?  What am I trying to say?  Do I have to say anything at all?    

I don’t know what art means to me because I am not an artist.  I grew up immersed in art but I did not grow up to become an artist.  I was like a feral child, taken in by the wolves, shaped and groomed to be like them, emulating their attitudes and appetites.  But as much as I was exposed to barks and Basquiat, I never found my footing.

Art history never interested me.  Abstract art doesn’t speak to me.  I can appreciate it for what it does to the artist and the audience but personally, it’s not my thing.  I could never pick up on the meaning.  But art can mean anything.  As I mentioned, the ways in which we can create art are nearly limitless.  But the interpretations are also expansive and intimidating.

An artist draws a circle on a piece of paper and group of people come along and look at it.  To one observer, it represents Earth.  To another, it’s a hole.  To someone else, it’s indicative of eternity.  But what was the artist trying to convey?  One or all or none of those suggestions?  That is the beauty and frustration of art.  It can mean what you want it to mean so you can gather your own satisfaction from it.  But when you try to extrapolate someone else’s expression, it can become maddening.   

And let’s be honest, art can be pretentious sometimes.  I was involved in enough art critiques in college to see people bullshit their way through an explanation of their work.  Someone puts up a few Crayola squiggles and suddenly your hearing how it represents their struggle to remain innocent child-like in an ever increasing hyper-sexual capitalist society.  A lot of the time, art feels like 40% talent and 60% bollocks.  Of course, it’s not always like that and there’s more straightforward art out there that isn’t exaggerated or flamboyant in its meaning.  But it’s hard to sift through the snobbery sometimes and it makes me want to walk away from it.

Maybe I just have a different definition of art.  Maybe my art isn’t like yours.  I can sling paint across a canvas in different patterns and call it nonrepresentational.  I can drink grapefruit juice out of a Coke can while standing on one foot and call it performance art.  I can grab a stool and break off one of the legs and suddenly I have a readymade piece of art to be thrust into the middle of a whitewashed room so it can be admired and interpreted.  What could it mean?  Whatever you think it means, that’s what it means.  Or whatever you think it means, it doesn’t mean that because I don’t want you to accept the first thing your mind thinks of when you see a piece of glass suspended by dental floss.

Or I can draw people and forget what it should mean.  Maybe I should do it because I have a talent for it and it doesn’t have to be perfect.  Maybe I should do it because at one time it was relaxing and it still could be if I could rid myself of my perfectionism.

Art is a wolf’s howl that still echoes within me.  I don’t answer the call anymore but I can still feel it rattle my bones on occasion.  I’ll always have that mentality, seeing things and trying to create things with an artist’s analytical eye.  But that’s about as far as my mindset goes.  I don’t have grand visions or elaborate set pieces hung up in the gallery of my mind.  It’s mostly occupied with insecurity and it’s a shame but that’s just how I turned out.  And things can still turn around.

I used to draw.  A lot.  Now I mostly just worry.  A lot.  I’m a long way from that kid on his sister’s bedroom floor, oblivious to future blunders and just happy with a piece of paper and a few charcoal pencils.  I wish I could get back to that place, to shoo away the shame and get back to the basics of bold lines and loving art, not because it has to mean anything or represent an uppity idea, but loving it because it just feels good inside, because it’s an internal motivation, a voice only I can hear that says, "Come on, let’s have some fun."