As a young child, I spent my days making things. Growing up as an only child, I had hours of time at my disposal with no interruptions. I’d collect objects and create elaborate inventions. I drew pictures. I made my favorite toys and created intricate imaginative worlds where they lived. I made everything.
Then, just like that, I stopped. No more paintings, no more side projects. All that was left were little collections that I couldn’t part with…boxes of stickers, piles of tools, stacks of paper and art supplies that just sat collecting dust. If I were able to pinpoint the reason that I stopped making physical art, it would be that I grew up. From the view I held, everything you did was either right or wrong. Good or bad. The pressure to always get it right when drawing ate at me. I wanted what I made to be perfect, and if it wasn’t going to be, there was no use trying. I found other things more interesting to pursue. All those hours I had when I was young started to be filled with practices, sleepovers, and parties. I started finding new ways to express myself that didn’t hold so much pressure to get it right every single time. No longer identifying as an artist, I started focusing on things that felt less restrictive. Things that I could experiment with and not get labeled a certain way. By the time high school had come around, I no longer had an interest in ‘art’ in the traditional sense. As a Freshman, every student at my school was required to take a foundational art class, and to be honest, I hated it. Although I could get by, drawing and shading were monotonous. I found no joy in fine art. Luckily; I had a teacher who saw that and applied for a grant to send me to an art camp across the state and I reluctantly agreed to go. Centrum changed my life. It was the first time I had someone tell me as a young adult that art doesn’t have to be perfect, shouldn’t be perfect, and that sometimes the mistakes we think we make actually lead to the best art. That camp, the teachers there, and the experience freed me. I came back to school after a week away, and I was an artist again. By the time I was a Senior, I had taken every art class available, and my teacher worked with me to create independent studies so I could work on my portfolio. I was considered to be the best artist at my school, and I looked the part. I won scholarships. I painted murals for the town. I designed our yearbook covers. I applied to an amazing university and went to New York to study Industrial Design hoping to work at Nike as a footwear designer. Want to know what happened my first week in college? I found out every other student who was accepted was just as talented as me, or worse…they were better. I had to dig deep to remember what my teachers at Centrum taught me. Art and life aren’t always a competition. There is no right and wrong, and good and bad are usually measured on a scale that holds many factors. Life isn’t always black or white and neither is art. I started transferring my thoughts about being an artist to becoming a designer, and creating for a purpose rather than for myself because that’s what interested me. I let go of being afraid of the blank page because someone else’s might be different or traditionally 'better', and just created the life and art that I wanted. Today I no longer think of myself as an artist. I think of myself as a creative thinker and a designer. I still don’t enjoy drawing, although I’ll do sometimes when I find a use for it. I find my current passions lie in increasing my knowledge and skill with many different mediums. I am easily inspired and always have side projects. Sometimes I enjoy them, sometimes I hate them, but I do them to gain experience so I can continue to create new things. Sometimes I decorate cakes, I like to make Halloween decorations, I sew costumes. Just like I did when I was young, I know there is freedom in creating and I don't judge myself or others on an arbitrary, made up scale. Like I did when I was young, I circled back to creating for the enjoyment of creating. Now I make everything. |
To be totally honest, I never liked art classes. In school, I always preferred math, science, and reading. In college, I studied biochemistry. I had no interest in drawing a 3D pottery bowl with a piece of fruit or attempting to fold origami. I’d much rather play sports or read than try to draw or fold something that inevitably turned out to look like an unidentifiable deformed lump.
I assumed at its core, art was being able to draw well, and I ruled it out as something fairly irrelevant to me. I didn’t think I would ever need or use art in my life. Now, I can’t open my eyes without seeing art everywhere. I have found some aspects of art I truly enjoy that I never really associated with “real” art when I was younger. The type of art I like includes cooking, biochemistry, sports, fashion, and photography to name a few. These are a bit atypical art preferences, but I think are all interesting to me. One of my favorite art projects is photography. I have spent much of my life traveling all over the world. In the last couple years, I motorcycled throughout North and Central America, and I lived on a boat I took on fun adventures like climbing icebergs and crossing the Panama Canal. Along the way I had a blast taking and editing photos. I love being able to take pictures and keep them as memories. Some of my favorite photos are of the wildlife I saw in Alaska, especially the bears and seals. I used to believe art classes were not for me. Now I see how art touches every single aspect of our lives; it seamlessly integrates into everything whether we see it or not. From quaternary protein structures to buildings to a sports logo, art is ubiquitous. Even if think you are bad at art like me, I hope you can discover an aspect of art that is interesting and meaningful to you. |