I must admit that I expected the results of my hiatus from drawing to be more drastic than they were. Please do not misunderstand me, I am not complaining because I didn't lose all of the ground I have worked so hard to gain. Still, on some level you could say that expectations were disappointed.
This is a bit of a hard feeling to define, but I think that I will go ahead and try anyways. We all want our lives to be epic. I mean, people in general want to feel that what they do is an accomplishment. That somehow they have overcome insurmountable odds to do something truly noteworthy. I am no exception to this rule. So I must confess that, not only do I find illustration to be challenging and at times brutally difficult, I want it to be challenging and brutally difficult. As a result of this, and also because I have experienced this in the past, I expected to have a lot of ground to make up when I picked up my pens again. And I didn't really.
So why be disappointed?
Well in part because I feel robbed of the epic struggle that I was sure was going to ensue, but also because I still did lose something, albeit less tangible, that I will still have to struggle to regain and it isn't an epic battle. It's more like overcoming the desire to hit the snooze one more time. Now I grant you that this isn't easy some mornings, but it also rarely brings the same satisfaction you get from the end of a long bear hunt.
Sitting with sweat dripping down your naked chest, covered in war paint and blood, you pull your hand made spear out of the stained, matted fur of the grizzly's throat and you feel the first shudders of the adrenaline high stealing your legs out from under you. You laugh, confident and reassured in your masculinity.
Instead of an epic struggle I have simply lost the momentum that takes so many small efforts of will to gain. It isn't that I have slid backward, I simply have to redo all the work that it took to go forward. Perhaps I should be happy that I have reached a milestone in my journey that marks a real, significant step towards professionalism in art, but right now I still want to hit that snooze button one more time.
(Languidly throws off the sheets.)
Sigh. Time to get to work.
7 comments:
It's much the same with programming, I'm afraid. It's real easy to gear yourself up for the epic struggles. The stuff that takes a lot of discipline is the really mundane stuff that takes up 80% of your time. Unfortunately, it's excelling that mundane part that makes on a great software engineer instead of just a l337 h4x0r.
I suspect it's the same with art: being a professional artist requires a lot of discipline with which someone who arts in their spare time can dispense.
I recently had a similar experience with Tae Kwon Do. I forgot the second half of two of my forms in class, and was rather embarrassed. Except that for some reason, I was pleased with my failure. I hadn't been practicing, so I should not have done well. I deserved that embarrassment, and it showed me the effect slacking off in my training had. So I do have ground to make up, and that's a good thing. But I would have felt annoyed if I hadn't. Not in that I had been cheated, but in that I myself was doing the cheating.
You guys are crazy. When something comes easy to me when I don't think it should, I count my blessings and move on, feeling like I just got away with something, and maybe chuckling to myself.
On the other hand, I can certainly relate to what you and John are saying about the discipline thing. Probably the largest single reason that I'm a terrible piano player (the other being an almost sheer lack of talent) is that I don't like sitting at a piano practicing scales and working on dynamics and technique. I just like pounding out chords and belting Dylan songs.
Also, are you writing from bed?
I am afraid that the bed and sheets are only metaphorical. I really only update this blog when I'm at RC.net.
On a different note, I had no idea anyone actually read this blog.
I thought I told you that I totally look forward to whenever you update.
Eric - we seem to have a family of writers all of whom do a great job.
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