Post-traumatic Portfilio Review (15 years later)

Getting older, for me, seems to be largely an exercise in accepting my "average-ness" and trying to enjoy life anyway. 

Recently my Dad played a new move on our on-going battle of "childhood-stuff-removal*" by bringing a portfolio of very old artwork to me at my house (instead of asking me to take it while I was at his house).  I tried to ignore the thing for several days but I finally had to confront the beast. 

Afterwards I was traumatized for several days, wondering how and why any adult ever encouraged the young me towards a career in visual art... or allowed me into art school (NOT my parents btw - they thought I should be an engineer or a lawyer). 

Only now am I starting to feel more at peace with the fact that I was not the artistic genius I thought I was... nor, given my track record, am I likely to achieve true greatness. (But being a minor-middleweight ain't so bad...)

I now present a brief history of my late-teenage-art for your entertainment (I couldn't bear to post the truly horrible stuff, so what you see here is still a glossier, white-washed version of what really was...)


***


There it is, the portfolio-beast, mocking me from my kitchen counter. The scattered tape holding it together might as well spell "doom"... 

Inside, I was pretty impressed by one sketch pad of drawings. It displayed fairly competent line work and confident shading. The choice of subject matter showed that its creator was clearly among the fore-runners of everything that became hipster-cool in the last 5 years.   

But the drawings didn't feel very familiar to me... 

Then I realized that they belonged to my older step-brother (who studied something architectural around the same time - I guess his stuff just got mixed in with my stuff)...

Oh, here we are. My stuff.
This was pretty 90s-cool... Also a complete and total rip-off of an older,cooler, actually artistic student at my school.

Somehow I convinced the powers-that-were at that school to let me do a mural in honour of the ongoing-history of art. (In the center there was supposed to a frame where they would hang student work.)


This thing was actually pretty huge, covering a whole wall of the cafeteria. I have NO pictures of the actual mural. This is the sketch.

I think I drew these skinheads for a history class... chunky feet and a big heads were de rigueur.

Now then! Here are three masterpieces from first year university drawing class.


The MO of that class was to tear down everything you thought you knew about drawing and develop your "unique" mark-making skills (which looked like everyone else's unique mark-making by the end).


I felt like I learned a lot in this class and became a genius. Everyone cried in this class at least once.


(There was also a crazy guy, a gun, and a restraining order associated with this class - which may be why it lives so clearly in my memory. In retrospect, the crazy guy was also the most gifted artist in the class...)


Unfortunately now, over a decade from graduating, I feel like I left university without ever gaining any classical training/techniques in painting or figure drawing and still struggle to learn this on my own (which is a good struggle... I guess...)**

Wow.
Pure genius.
(...and, may I remind you, this was "the good stuff"... 
The bad stuff was too embarrassing... the good stuff is bad enough!)




Back to the present, my new art-hobby is painting traditional tattoo flash. It's a fun way to learn some new skills and it's relaxing to not worry about making challenging content. It's satisfying to make something that simply looks nice. There's nothing "to get"... I just like doing it. Simple.


Here is the latest. I feel good about it.

I try not to waste time regretting the path I've taken... but I do feel like I've "wasted" a lot of my life thinking I was pretty decent at making art (and then watching TV) when I really should have been working much harder at developing skills.


I've only ever been half-hearted about being in the art-world because I have never truly believed I could make a living there (even as I AM making one!) I've always been so sensitive to the nay-sayers in "real" world and kept one foot out of the "art" world to make everyone less nervous. I think it is time to either get in with both feet or get out completely...






The end.






* My dad wants it all my childhood stuff out of his large house. I don't necessarily want to throw it out but I don't really want it in my small apartment either...  I am trying to leave a solitary box of stuffed animals in his house as I reminder that I once lived there... 


** My personal theory is that it is way more fun to do weirdo/abstract/non-figurative artwork if, in the back of your mind, you know that you CAN to do realistic/figurative/classical things but choose not to.