On being a lacksadaisical artist

I have a very long and often conflicted relationship with the process of producing visual "art."

Like a lot of people, I started drawing and painting at an early age, but before I had much of a chance to figure out my own relationship to what I was making, other people began characterising what I produced as different from what other kids my age were producing. People started to consider me to be talented or gifted in the area of visual art - a label I was already carrying with respect to scholastic achievement.

The problem for me was that it was fairly easy fulfilling the role of an academically gifted child. There were some very clear guidelines and benchmarks to follow: do a lot of reading, make good marks on tests and essays, things like that.

It was a lot less easy to figure out how to meet people's expectations of being artistically gifted. All I knew was that I liked playing with form and colour - I couldn't figure out what it was that differentiated what I was doing from what other children my age were doing, and so I was never secure in my ability to repeat my previous "successes."

You must understand that it matters very much in all of this that I was an abused child, and that the trigger for the abuse I received was almost always stated by my abuser as my failure to be what I was supposed to be. So as a child, I wasn't all that scared of "earning" punishment for not being as academically successful as I was supposed to be, because I understood how to be that way, and I rarely failed to produce the expected results. But I never understood how to ensure that any visual art I produced would meet the expectations of previous efforts, and so each time I did something in that area, I was terrified that I would fail to meet other people's expectations and would be punished. Yet at the same time, I loved making visual art.

So I began making art secretly. I'd paint or draw and then destroy what I had done. Paradoxically, I would also take art classes in school, and the art I did in public was often displayed as a good example of some class exercise or other. By the time I reached university, I was carrying around a small notebook in which I frequently "doodled" - this being the term I've always preferred to use in relation to what I do, and what I make, as calling it art seems to be tempting people to judge me and my visual productions, and find them lacking. I did everything I could to downplay the importance to me of "doodling," and although by now I wasn't destroying everything I did as I completed it - although I'd often throw drawings out after they'd been around for a while - I did develop the habit of giving almost everything I made away to the first person who saw it and said something nice about it. Slowly I started doodling less and less often, until I'd only make something a couple of times a year, when I felt compelled to make something.

So, after a lifetime of sporadically producing art, never being sure whether it really was art, and always afraid that even if I did manage to make art occasionally, it might not ever be able to duplicate the accomplishment, I have very little record of what I've done. Over the past decade, I've been keeping what I make, largely due to the encouragement of my partner, though I still haven't been making doodles - or art, or whatever it is - very often.

Part of that is because of my disabilities. I can no longer paint with oils because they have become toxic to me, and using waterpaints or doing work with pen and ink requires certain physical flexibility and strength (in terms of the positions I have to hold in order to do that kind of work) that I can no longer achieve without pain. But recently, I've rediscovered coloured pencils, and I'm starting to doodle with them.

Which finally brings me around to the point of this post. Over on tor.com, Pablo Defendini posted a brief note about an analogue to NaNoWriMo, in which people are doing at least one drawing every day during the month of November. I don't have the courage (or maybe it would be hubris, who knows) to formally get involved with the group doing this, but I have decided to commit myself to making one drawing/doodle every day this month, and posting the results in this blog.

Sometimes, when I sit down to make my daily doodle, I'll just do what I usually do, which is make a line on paper and see where it goes. But I do intend to try out some things that are new or different for me, to make myself doodle outside my box, as it were. And yes, one of the reasons I'm doing this in public is because comments are welcome.

Doodle #1

This doodle was done without any conscious thinking about form - and when I start out in that way, my doodles tend to be organic and full of curving lines. I did decide on a basic colour palette before hand, of browns and dark reds, but as the doodle evolved, it demanded some highlights of pink, orange and purple. I think it may be relevant that I recently re-read John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids.

Doodle #2

When I doodle, my natural inclination is to draw curved lines and create shapes that are often described as organic. For my second doodle of the month, I decided to make myself use straight lines and angular shapes. Again, the palette was preselected, partly in response/reaction/contrast to the palette used in doodle #1.