something something the artistic process
Writing has always come much more naturally to me than art. I was a ravenous reader in my youth - inhaling books during class, recess, and by flashlight under the covers every night. Converting that into writing felt like a natural evolution, so subconscious I never stopped to reflect on why other people didn't make the same transition from consumer to creator. I imagine for people who are good at art, or sewing, or anything else, they may have had a similar process. At one point or another, they simply began at whatever it was that they had become so adept at appreciating, and only later realized that doing so was unique.
Drawing, on the other hand, has never come easily to me. As a child, I envied the ease with which my mother filled in coloring pages, and I don't know that I ever grew past that. Where writing felt like a natural progression from reading, drawing felt inherently unnatural - as though I were trying to sculpt the air into marble with my bare hands. Twenty-odd years later, I still find myself chewing at my cheek, furrowing my brow as I struggle to figure out why the scribbles on the tablet in front of me look nothing like the image in my mind's eye - and growing even more frustrated still when I realize the image in my mind's eye is nonexistent, a swirling abstraction of an indescribable concept that is so intangible it can never be put to paper.
Despite the seeming impossibility of drawing anything that I would be eager to call my own work, I have found myself drawn, time and time again, to art as a means of expression. I've painted murals on laundry room walls, designed elaborate building interiors that will never be built, drafted contraptions to remedy minor day-to-day inconveniences, sketched character designs and learned to animate in painstaking, hand-drawn, frame-by-frame detail. I learned Live2d to bring an ugly abomination of a cat to life, and then continued to use it to create avatars that can speak in my place. Art pulls me back into her like a cruel, addictive mistress - I walk away battered and tired and so full of rage, having hated every moment of the process, and somehow find myself tangled in bed next to her twelve hours later.
A couple months ago, I managed to deduce the password to my fifteen-years-abandoned fanfiction-writing account. I was twelve then, give or take - and the writing reflects it. The structure is stiff, the vocabulary limited, the pacing horrendous. Emotional nuance is nonexistent, and perhaps the only thing I had any skill for at all was some inkling of creativity in my plot ideas and characters. It's funny to look back on - nowadays, creativity feels like the area I struggle the most with; every idea feels so miserably unoriginal and regurgitated that compelling myself to create it feels less like "creation" and more like poorly-concealed plagiarism, no matter how little it matches whatever inspired it. I curse the modern era, the lack of originality, and excuse my own role in the death of the arts with a resigned "there's no original thought left to think".
Regardless of my own bitter critique for my past works, the comments I received on that writing were glowing. Sincere, kind suggestions and feedback. Honest praise. Some fics had comments as recent as the past couple of years, begging for updates and continuations of stories that had fallen to the wayside as the chaos of middle school chewed up that creative little girl and spat out a soggy pile of anxiety and depression in her place. Reading through those old stories and the comments on them felt like re-creating twelve-year-old me in the back of my mind, a doll made of peanut butter and Capri Sun straws and knee-length dresses and butterfly hair clips. She's propped up next to a filing cabinet of childhood crayon scribblings and straight-A report cards, surrounded by dollar store stuffed animals and the only two Webkinz plush her parents could afford.
(They were Googles and Alley Cat, if you were curious.)
Remembering that version of myself is, in some sense, what prompted the creation of this website. The longer I reflected on that long-lost creativity and self-confidence, the less "lost" they felt. Or maybe the more "lost" they felt, rather than feeling like things I had never had to begin with. I was not always lacking in creativity or the confidence to share it. There was a time when I knew what I wanted to create and I created it, and I was proud when I finished it, because I had brought my ideas to life with my own hands.
I cannot remember the last time I was proud of something I created in that way. This website, I suppose - although even that pride was overshadowed by apprehension. "It doesn't quite look the way I want yet," I prefaced. "It's a work in progress!" I'd insist. It has been a remarkably long time since I finished creating something and showed it off without a disclaimer or seven preceding it, apologizing proactively for my own perceived inadequacy.
There are so many abandoned art pieces on my tablet. Characters I wanted to draw that I love, scrapped when I realized I could not do them justice. Dynamic poses discarded as quickly as they were drafted, the thumbnails enough to make me cringe a year later. I was told once that my art lacked passion - if I drew a character I cared about, perhaps that life would shine through the art and give it that spark that feels absent. But I can't do it. I cannot compel myself to draw something mediocre, knowing that it will fall short of my inarticulable, abstract ideal for what it should be. I cannot even begin to improve my art, so enshrouded in unknowns that determining what is "wrong" with it feels as impossible as identifying what is "right" about it.
It is easy to create bad writing. I can pen something truly abominable, and still know that when I return to proofread it the next day or week or month, it will take mere minutes to transform it into something at least comprehensible, if not pleasant. But how do I create bad art when I can't even identify its flaws? How do I make peace with making something badly when the hope of making it good later feels so unattainable? And dear god, why do I keep doing it when I hate it?