Well, let’s start at the beginning. I was born with a birth defect. My feet were twisted and turned backwards. The muscles in my calves were formed wrong and wrapped around my shin bones causing my backwards feet. For the first 5 years of my life I wore giant metal braces on my legs that meant I was immobilized, no crawling, no walking, and no movement at all. All this time I would go back to the doctors every couple of months and they would turn these braces a few degrees toward the front, eventually going all the way past the front and 90 degrees back inward and then backwards to the front again. My mother was told I would never walk or if I did walk, it would be with a severe limp.
So, in these first 5 years I spent a lot of time with paper and crayons and I would draw and draw and draw some more. I learned to read and write before everyone else my age, but my drawings never really got that much better… for a kid that is. I became introverted and lacked in social skills. Still do in some ways and have trouble dealing with most social settings, especially in large group settings. When the braces came off, they could not keep me still and the drawing sort of went away. That was until I went to school. A few class projects that involved drawing sent teachers into a frenzy. Here was a kid that could draw anything he saw, like a human photocopier. My teachers pushed at me to draw all the time and this actually made me want to do it less and less. I wanted to move, wanted to run around. I had these new legs and wanted to use them and art became just a side skill I didn't want use.
Throughout elementary school and into high school I ran track, held records in sprinting that are still in place to this day at my former school. I wanted to run, jump, and climb trees. I did not want to sit at a table or desk and draw, mostly because I could do both with ease now. I can still draw anything I can see but never really had the ability to draw what I couldn't see; my imagination and recall seemed to be sub-par. Without reference I was lost.
I never came from a family of money and as all my friends went off to college, I was left behind to find something to do with myself. I started to draw again and I started to paint for the first time. I fell back in love with making things that made others happy, or sad, or even angry at times. It was at this time that I realized just how powerful art could be. How it could draw out emotions in people that they themselves didn't know they had. This moved me in a way that I didn't know was possible either and at first it was a hindrance. I continued to make art but it was for myself, and still is to a point. I make things. Paintings, sculptures, drawings in sketchbooks, and then no one else got to see them. My walls are covered with my art and I slowly started to run out of room for new stuff, so I started to give it away to friends and family. This lead to them asking for me to do new works for them, but I still found it hard to let this stuff go. Something I still wrestle with to this day. When I create, even off of a suggestion, I want it to be mine and mine alone.
After many years I decided that this skill should be put to use. I looked into going back to school for Graphic Design… this however turned out to be a huge mistake. I got suckered into attending a For-Profit school that really did nothing to help educate me. In the end I was left with a degree that is worth less than the paper it is printed on, not recognized by the people who hire for these positions, and a student loan debt that was in my opinion; astronomical. I fell into a depression and wanted to do nothing to help myself.
Trying to pull myself from my slump, I decided to paint something. That something is the painting I posted below. It is a reflection of how my world seemed to be a beautiful thing, but is contorted and out of whack with reality. Rolling and twisting hills as this upheaval of reality mixed with the torment in my mind’s eye. As I like to say, the virtual landscape of my minds eye.
This is where I
decided to make a change. A change for the better I had hoped. Getting your
foot in the door of the art world is a very hard thing to do. The “Are you
experienced catch-22” was a major drawback. I would visit galleries and show
them my work (which they liked) so that I could try to get a showing of my
work, only to be asked where my work had been showed before. The answer of
course was nowhere. So I would be rejected because of this.
So now I am trying to get far more serious about this. I am extending my desire to break in and I am willing to do what it takes this time around. But I still have problems with initiative and of course fear. I am afraid of not being accepted, of starting something, and being afraid to mess it up and having to speak about the hows and whys of my art. I have a slight fear of success and everything that might come with it. Not that I don’t want to create, but more along the lines of being scared that I have more ideas coming forward then I have time to work on. Paintings get started and then put on the back burner, to simmer and grow cold. I am now striking out against this and trying to push myself to finish the things I start and this blog is part one of my plans. Hopefully, setting a schedule and a few goals will push me forward and I am going to be trying some new things in order to try and keep these creative juices flowing. I am going to dabble in some time-lapse videos of my painting process and try to jump into other areas of art.
This, I think, will help me to be more consistent in my production of art works and I am hoping that one day this will be all I do for a living, because this is what I want to do with my life and this is just the starting point of what I hope becomes a long and fulfilling career of bringing joy to others. I have had one showing now and I look forward to having some more in the near future… hopefully.
If you are an artist, I would like to hear from you. What is your story? Why do you do this? Have you had any success with it or are you still trying to break in? What are your major sources of inspiration? What are your fears and why, if you have fears, where do you think these fears come from?
Why art?
