Tale #55 - The Tale of Why I Create

Hi, all!

Before I launch in to something, I've got a link to show you:

Sixty Minute Artist

This guy knows stuff. Mostly art stuff, but he knows STUFF! Go. Visit. NOW.


Anyways, onwards to other stuff!

No art for this week. Mostly because my new job's kept me a little busy. So it can be a little tricky to sneak something in. So I think I'll start stockpiling what I have so we can have a major art-post at some point.

But in Aboriginal Art, we did go out to do some landscape sketches. I will tell you that mother nature was out to get me that day. Here's a nice look at what she had in store for me:

- Lots of wind = blew my papers around and ripped one of them.

- Ducks = Again, I am at odds with them. This time, it was me being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They took off and well... they nearly bombarded me with duck-dung in mid air. Fortunately, nothing landed on me. But it landed directly infront of me. Let me give you an idea of how close it was - I could feel the wind of it as it dropped down infront of me. Talk about close! Of course, everyone in our sketch group saw this and started poking a bir of fun....

- Dogs = If it isn't the wild life, it's the "life" people sometimes bring with them. In this case, it came in the form of two small growling, barking, and not-entirely-pleasent-looking dogs. I encountered them when I was trying to find the best spot to stop and sketch. I had just walked up the path when I encountered the man with his dogs. I was probably only about a few feet away when the dogs stopped, glared at me and started barking and growling. The owner said that the dogs didn't bite. At that time, I hoped he was right. So I started carefully trying walk around the dogs. However, that was short lived as the dynamic furry duo started after me. With a moment of supprised explicitives muttered under my breath and not wanting my legs gnawed off by the tiny terrors, I did what any sane person would do - get the hell out of there! So this is a big message to you all - if someone says their dogs don't bite, just get out of there quickly....

So what did I sit down to sketch? Well... I found this Chinese pagota, sat inside of it and sketched my POV looking out of the pagota at the statues and trees. It's just a quick sketch, but it turned out nicely. The only catch here is that I used my large very-scanner-unfriendly sketchbook. So this pretty much means I'll probably have to lay it flat and take a picture with my didgital camera. Not something I like doing, but I'll give it a shot.

But in that excursion that day, my art teacher spoke to me. He was talking about my landscape sketch and that he liked what he saw. He said that he sees a lot of disipline to my work. So now here's where I get on my mental tangent here that had me thinking about it much later.

I never believed myself to be "disiplined" through art. Whenever someone says that I'm disiplined, I always think of someone who studies very very hard, who practises hard at something every day, and someone who does whatever they can to strive for perfection. The other thing I think of when it comes to that word is generally someone who's when to art classes to learn what they've learned. So when I sat down to think of this, I wonder just a little bit.

For me, I don't really consider myself "disiplined." Not that I don't work hard at it or anything. But it's just that I don't tend to think of myself in that light. The thing with me is that how I learnt appreciate art came from my family (who's art-loving) and how I learnt to draw was entirely on my own. Well... mostly on my own. My family had a bit of encouragement to give out there. The earliest memory I have with art and family is one late afternoon when I was little. My dad was busy in the kitchen. I totally forget what it was that he was doing at the time. Like most little non-school-aged kids, I went up to my dad and asked to play with him. He told me he had a lot of work to do and maybe he'd play with me later. With a little more pestering, he sat me down in the dinning room and set out a crayon and paper. I could even remember the colour of the crayon. When he left, I started to draw. I've forgotten what it was I drew that day, but what I do know is that it was my first introduction to art. Little could anyone have guessed where I've ended up today artistically.

So now jumping back from early memory lane here, I mostly taught myself to draw from books I picked up from the local libraries. Now the thing with my city is that my city isn't pro-art. They just don't support it enough. And they still don't. Most artists, graphic designers, animators, storytellers... ect, move out of the city as soon as they can. So as you can imagine with a city like mine, we wouldn't have a lot of artbooks back then. I mean now we do have a few more in there and it's expanded (which is supprising to me, yet very welcome by me). But back then, we didn't have a lot. So I took what they had and learned what I could from them. Afterwards, my parents started to buy me a few books occasionally to help support this. I have a very closely knit family who would do anything to support me and this was just one of those ways. I also have them to thank for getting me in to the world of digital art at an early age too back when something like that in my city was almost unheard of. (Of course, I actually find it kinda funny that Fisher Price now came out with their Digital Arts And Crafts Studio tablet for kids which reminds me of my old TV-tablet I had when I was a kid! XD I say it's about time they came back! XD )

But anyways, here's the thing about me learning to draw that makes me say that I wasn't really "disiplined" at it - I had fun with it. As a kid, it was okay to draw purple suns or blue kittens. Perfection didn't matter. Having fun with the medium did. I also loved (and still love) using imagination. The big thing for me was that I enjoyed what I was doing and creating. Art was the thing that put me in direct contact with what was going on inside my head.

The only bit of formal training about how to draw came from that one class I took in high school. What I discovered in that class what that with the teacher, he was always about drawing everything realisically and with meaning. Everything had to mean something like for example "The apple with barbed wire around it = Someone's view of education for women in a 3rd world country" or "the baby doll's head with a toy hand gernade it it's mouth and electrical tape = represents genocide" or DuChamp's "Fountain." (You know.... that one of the urnial in the art gallery being called a fountain...?) Now I just made that up just on the spot (except for that DuChamp thing. That really does exsist!), but you get the picture. With me, I actually can draw realism and I will do it no sweat.... but I just don't like tackling that kind of meaning in that kind of way unless I can have fun with it and be a little lighthearted. Even storytelling with art is appreciated by me. I like having people enjoying what they see and appreciating it at face value and even having fun with what they see rather than having to think really hard about it. A little meaning tackled in a tastefully good fun way is okay with me. Weirdness without the fun just isn't my thing. But for the teacher teaching it, it was. So I started off with this class going at it my usual fun way not trying to hunt around for meanings but appreciating art as art and to invoke maybe a little emotion at face value. I also started off with character sheets and "commercial" artwork as well and introduced a little digital art. He hated it. When I asked why, he asked for meaning and asked why was I drawing what he considered "cartoons." Now I thuroughly believe that "cartoons" are still art. They still take the same ammount of skill to do. The same thing was there in my head back then. I didn't quite get why my old art teacher would have differentiated that so strongly. I also didn't quite get why he hated digital art either. I also asked about digital art and he simply said that digital art wasn't art. Again, it was a very confusing thing for me as was the idea of "cartoons." After that, I tried changing up the styles and went with what he wanted. But I always seemed to come up short with him. Throughout the semester, he'd always come back to that whole "cartoon" thing even when I wasn't drawing anything "commerical." He then started refering to me as "cartoonist" as though it were some form of artist's insult. The thing about the old art class was that he never taught us anything. I know to most that's a general student comment that never seems to hold water and seems to only come out whenever a student fails something. But the thing was, I never failed that class and that I genuinely mean that. He really didn't teach us any of the skills. He expected us to just go out and do it. The only thing he really did teach was art history. So it was more of this "trial by fire" teaching approach where he simply expected us to figure out on our own what to do. Because of that experiance, I didn't really go back to any art classes teaching traditional art until recently with Aboriginal Art. The experiance I had in the high school one was pretty negative and one I didn't enjoy. So I was back on my own teaching myself again.

But in those years between then and now, my views of art did change as did my ways of tackling it. For example, you don't draw lines in the sand of what art is. That's a perfect way of closing doors which is a really bad thing. It shut down possiblities you can do with your own art and really narrows your view. Another thing is that being flexible with your art styles and mediums is a great thing to do. Even as I'm posting, I'm branching out further and further with my art skills in to all kinds of things. Even cooking! XD (Eventhough I do suck at cooking, I'm still working at it which is probably also a good idea too.) There's more stuff, but this is what comes off the top of my head the fastest.

So now comes today. I'm back in another art class - Aboriginal Art, and I'm doing quite well with it. I enjoy the class alot. I mean yeah, I still have stuff to work on. You never stop learning, right?

But the thing that never really changed about me and art is that I always loved it and just enjoyed it which is one thing that really can't be taken away from me. The same goes for media arts and storytelling too. I genuinely enjoy it and love it which is why I'm always wanting to branch out and learn more. In doing this, I also gain the flexibility that I want and need so I can get in to the industry I love to death. (Freelance is fun, but it's really hard to do locally.)Working in the media field is just that dreams I'd want to complete and just dying to do. It's that one dream I'm chasing right now. I guess you can see it just by looking trough TOAMG. XD

So do I think I'm that "disiplined?" I don't think so. Well.... maybe just a little. But more or less, I just enjoy what I do and I don't plan to give that up any time soon.



.... Woah... that was one long post. I think this is one of the longest! Anyone got a tape measure? A word counter? XD Anyways, I'll see you all later!