DQ15 -Picking Up a Pen

 

Picked up a pen today and made an attempt at drawing. My first attempt in literally years. I’m not sure why it is so difficult, nor what the nature of the obstruction is, to just laying something that makes a mark onto a piece of paper and moving it around a little bit. 

As far back as I can remember I have been an artist. I used to make art as naturally as I read a book, or wrote a poem (another one of my lost arts). If I lacked paint, I used crayons. If I lacked paintbrushes, I used whatever laid to hand. I have painted with a kitchen sponge, with paper towels, with cotton balls, with tampons. I have painted on paper, canvass, wallboard, plywood, glass....

But I haven’t painted recently. For whatever reason, I got out of the habit. And as time passed the path back to art got steeper and steeper until it seemed insurmountable. It might be a form of writer’s block - the blank space of the canvass gets whiter and whiter, more stark and intimidating. How can I mar it with my clumsy brush? What if I fuck it up? What if I waste a bunch of expensive paint and make something not just ugly but embarrassing? 

Against these idiotic thoughts I try to erect a barricade of reason. So what if I fuck up a cheap pre-stretched canvass from Joann’s craft store? I can always paint over it. So what if I’m embarrassed by the result? Nobody is gong to break into my garage to look at it. Plus, you know, I can always paint over it. Besides, isn’t the process more important than the product? 

I am never going to make “great art.” If that were ever within my potential, which it probably wasn’t, it ain’t anymore. I wasn’t a child prodigy, and I probably won’t be an elderly prodigy like Grandma Moses either. I can’t make art for the ages. But here’s what I can do: get lost in ecstasy.

I can exercise my artist’s eye. I can cultivate my eye for beauty, and train myself to seek it out, to notice and appreciate it everywhere and at every moment. I can strive to imitate it, magnify it, reproduce it, spread it over more space and more time, with my own feeble gestures. I can practice art as a form of worship, as a form of praise, as a form of magick. 

Kurt Vonnegut said: 

Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

So today, I picked up a pen. And I made my soul grow.