Inspiration, Part II

On a recent YouTube video, self-published author Kristen Martin talked about falling back in love with life (+ writing). Since I had just written my blog post "Time and Inspiration" a couple of days earlier (I'm writing this on February 24, and that blog post is scheduled for February 28, so we're time-traveling here), her video struck a chord in me. In that blog post, I talked about trying to organize my office/studio and placing paintings on my brand new drafting table to inspire me to get back to painting. This blog will be a reflection and response to Kristen's video, as well as a follow-up to my previous blog post.

Over the past few years, I have felt like I have been gradually slipping away from who I am/was as a person and the things that I liked about myself. Some of this was self-sabotage, and some of this was due to being around toxic people. Whatever the cause or reason, I felt like I wasn't living so much as existing. 

When I was in college, I majored in art, and a few years ago, I started taking art lessons again. At the time, I felt strong. I felt like I knew myself, and I had confidence in my abilities. Then I changed mediums, and things quickly went sideways. I had painted with watercolor, but my old, cheap paint had behaved differently, and my subject matter had been different. Working with "real" materials such as expensive watercolor paper (the kind that comes in large sheets that are folded and torn into smaller sizes, not in pads or tablets) and expensive paint (a tiny set of professional grade 5 ml tubes, which is so small that it's almost like a joke, was almost $50) can be really intimidating. It's like when I buy really pretty journals, but I don't want to mess them up. I am so self-conscious about wasting materials that I lose confidence, and art comes from a place of confidence and practice. A loosely painted line may seem so casual and effortless, but you may practice making terrible lines for a year to get to the point where that single line seems effortless. So, I actually do so much better with "the cheap stuff," but the drawback is that it's made of "the cheap stuff" and isn't professional grade, archive quality.

In class, I struggled. I began to feel like a failure. The harder I tried, the worse it got, in my opinion. I felt lost, abandoned by what I had always thought was talent. It really threw me and made me question a lot of things I had taken for granted. I lost faith in my abilities and myself. Life has thrown a lot of curve balls my way, calling to attention my many assumptions. So, after a year of struggling, I changed mediums again, and things weren't exactly improving. Now I really felt screwed. This wasn't good.




Not to mention, why wasn't I getting the same sense of motivation and inspiration out of my adult class that I had felt in the art department back in college? Was that excitement and creative high something I would never feel again? Why was I depressed when I had been so excited on my first day back in art that I was trembling while trying to measure and cut a piece of pastel paper? I liked many of the people in my art class, so I wasn't sure why I wasn't feeling motivated by it.

Underneath all that were bigger questions. Were joy and freedom gone forever? Would I ever feel happy again? Why did excitement only seem tied to fleeting moments and things you later learned to stop believing?


I really felt so incredibly frustrated. I am not sure there are words to explain how at odds I felt with myself, my life, the things I had taken for granted, the things I had thought were true about life and about myself.

For months I struggled. I kept trying, but I was losing my joy in what I actually loved doing. I was tempted to compare myself to others. When people complimented my work, I didn't believe them. If I had been looking at someone else's art and thought it was pitiful, I would be really bad at pretending it's good. I just assumed that these people were better liars than I was.

So, I knew that there was only one thing wrong with my art. Me. Maybe it wasn't talent or ability, but where my head was at. I was getting fairly sick of myself, and I knew I needed to fix this... whatever... and get back to my happy place. At this point, I examine where I'm at, what isn't working, what I want, what I don't want. A lot of things I think of as problems aren't really that serious. It's mostly my attitude which colors absolutely everything. I really don't think that there's a tangible reason I feel this way. But the only way I know to turn it around is to focus on what I want and to start working on the things I like to do. Chiefly, writing and art.

There are many more things, but these two are the ones that always float on the surface of everything else. I had been so focused on "serious art" that I had lost the joy of it. And I had been telling myself for two and a half years that I was going to fix up my office/studio. It was actually just a second bedroom that was being used for storage, and I couldn't bear to open the door and look upon the horrible mess. I only have one and a half closets. The half closet is full of Christmas stuff, and the other holds my clothes and shoes. There is no walk-in closet. For two and a half years, I had been telling myself, "But..." "But I need..." "But, first..." And I was but-tired.

So, I had been shopping around for a couch but couldn't make up my mind. I was about to click order on one that looked really nice when I saw the video that showed just how short it was. Either the girl was an Amazon, or that was a short couch. I hesitated, and, at the last minute, I decided not to order a couch but to order a desk and drafting table. It was impulsive, and that's something that was once true about me as a teenager. The older I got, the less spontaneous I was, the more I did the same thing over and over, and the less I trusted new things. Ordering the desk and drafting table felt like the perfect thing to do. I knew how much it meant to me, my creativity, and my sanity.

Two days later, the desk arrived, and then the drafting table arrived. It was a challenge to get them in the apartment (they left the 92-pound box on the front steps of the building), but putting them together was actually pretty simple. Then I spent days moving bookcases and books and other furniture. Although it was tiring, it felt good and right. This little project eventually began spilling over into other rooms. I rearranged furniture in those rooms, too. The whole place is looking better, and that makes me feel better.

In the aforementioned previous blog post, I said that I still had not initiated the drafting table but had placed some paintings on the drafting table to inspire me. It must have worked, because my first thought the next morning was that I was going to paint that day.

And I did. Ignoring the "real" art materials readily available, I used my relatively cheap paper and the $5.99 paint from Michael's. It was liberating. Throughout this blog post are pictures of my work in progress. I'm still puttering around, but I'm having fun.

 

Kristen's post about making changes and falling back in love with life really struck a chord because this is what I had been dealing with. There is a bucket list of things I've been putting off for one reason or another. Sure, I can't do everything all at once, and I may not can do some things right now, but I can make a plan and work toward those things.

It's not really a bad thing to not be able to do everything all at once. Sometimes, it's good to be forced to make decisions, prioritize, and give myself more time to think about future decisions. And it's all about the process, too, right?