Over the years, some of my friends have been surprised to learn that I can draw at all, because I don’t do it that much anymore. In my room hangs one of my paintings, and there is a book tucked away somewhere with the best of what survived my tumultuous teenage years, but there has hardly been anything in the visual art range from me in some time.
I’m thinking about this because recently I began drawing again and what has come out of me is surprising. Mostly I’ve been doing rough drawn cartoons, but they have become an outlet of creativity that I haven’t been able to express otherwise. So drawing is my latest thing.
I didn’t really begin drawing in earnest until I went to high school and not until my junior year. I was surrounded by a mass of extremely talented and creative people. Everyone sort of had their thing and mine was acting, some could sing, some played instruments and one or two could draw. Many of us dabbled in more than one thing.
My defining trait then and now is I have an unrelenting need to express myself creatively and any way I can. The medium changes over the years and sometimes it lapses entirely, but the need is there and I assume it always will be.
However, in high school I suffered from a massive inferiority complex. Aside from acting, I didn’t feel that anything else I did was worth shit. It didn’t help that I was surrounded by people that I thought could do it better and usually did. For that reason I doodled but that was about it.
In my junior year, I had to take a visual arts class to complete my arts sequence and get my diploma. I took the initiative to show my teacher, Ms. Jordan, some of my rough sketches. I still don’t know why, but she decided to take me under her wing. She gave me my first real sketchbook, a bunch of different pencils and a book of classic art and told me to draw at least 15 minutes a day 30 on weekends and show her the results. She told me to draw anything, pictures from magazines or stuff I see around me. She gave me tips and told me about shading techniques, lighting sources, lead densities, and anything else she could think of. She told me not to worry about what my friends were drawing, to not even show them if I didn’t want to.
After a short while, something really weird happened: I started to get pretty decent, and Ms. Jordan started to encourage me to show my work. She gave my final project a spot in the art show downtown without ever seeing it. I think I almost cried when I saw she put my painting with the projects for the advanced class even though I wasn’t in it. There’s still a picture somewhere of me standing in front of that painting, and aside from being on stage it was my proudest moment in high school. It was the first time I really felt like an artist. I don’t think any of those friends of mine went to the show, but that’s okay. This was something that I genuinely felt was just about me and I was finding I liked being on my own.
I continued to draw even after high school. I only stopped when I got into my first real relationship with a guy who I considered a better artist than I, and who also left little room for me in our relationship. The irony is the inferiority complex that kept me from drawing in the first place made me stop.
I may have taken a long road back here, but you don’t stop being an artist, and so I pick up the pencil again. We’ll see where it takes me this time. I am the true jack of all trades, and if enough time goes by I might just get good at everything.
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