twenty-four: ending Blaugust with some collage art and a point about the absurdity of rending fidelity as the only real art. And also a very gay bull.
I tried sketching in public this month. And it was agonizing, that exposure and vulnerability of making something "bad" where someone could see me doing it. I kept returning to the same question: why am I doing this? Somewhere in the last few years I found analog collage scissors-and-glue, the physical act of cutting something apart so it can mean something else. And I do think I'm good at it. The photography has been good for years. These are not a diverted route to a destination called Real Art. They are the arrivals.
But they don't feel like arrivals because there's this unspoken hierarchy baked so deep into the culture that I absorbed it before I had language for it. At the top sits photorealism. The ability to reproduce the visible world with enough fidelity that a stranger can say I thought that was a photograph, as though the highest purpose of a human hand is to do slowly and badly what a camera already does in a fraction of a second. Art surely ceased to exist after Kodak produce the first camera.
What? No?
Comfort zones
Learning anything in public is exceptionally hard for me and has been since I was a child. I did not get a lot of positive support for things I made from my parents who, rather than reinforce the effort, immediately critiqued the quality. A 10 year old doesn't needing meter tips for poetry. A 10 year old, who struggled to get attention in a house of 5 kids (two of whom [twins {with undiagnosed ADHD}] had a tendency to come home via police car), needs to feel seen.
I mostly wrote because words were easy to hide in journals in password-protected diskettes or under a mattress or in a box in an alcove under a yew bush in the "pirate island" by the junior high. It was a copse of trees that the city stopped mowing when the trees got a little too tall and us kids used it as a place to hide and read on weekends.
Trying hard things
I didn't get back to visual art until after college when I got my first digital camera. I knew enough about photography that I figured I could figure to out. I re-analyzed topic from my 23 years of journaling online after I got my LiveJournal entries extracted into my Obsidian database and photography is far and a away the biggest thing I have written about for literal decades.
I feel like I got photography because I could see something in the world and first, faithfully render it and, eventually, render a version of the word that I saw. I have never been able to do that with pencils visually. Sure, I could describe a version of reality, and I absolutely can render my version of the world in handwritten text, but that's not For Real Art ™. Because real art os only art that strictly represents concrete reality rendered in the highest fidelity possible.
Because what is more real than condemning college students to hell next to a very gay rainbow bull?
I took this photo in 2006....
Views change, internalization lags
I believe all this is bullshit but I still wrestle with it which is why I always try to learn to draw again adn again and again. And I feel like I fail again and again and...
Because I'm looking at my inability to render a perfect reality as failure which.... That's just folly. I know this is absurd and I have known it intellectually for years. But knowing a thing and having that knowledge burned indelibly to whatever part of a nervous system still flinches when someone looks at your sketchbook.
So I went back to something that I distinctly enjoy doing and am not calling it failure. Because I needed something to remind me there are other things I can do that have artistic value.
It's not the rendering
Here is what I think is actually true: the point was never the rendering. It was never about making the thing look like the thing. A photograph is not a lesser drawing. A collage is not a broken painting. Writing is not what you do when your hands can't hold a brush. The choosing is the art. The medium the thing arrives in is not hierarchy.
I don't know if I'm going to keep trying to draw. I might. I might not. But I am quite tired treating the question as a referendum on whether I'm a real artist. The pirate island kid hiding poems under a yew bush was a real artist. The guy who pointed a camera at a rainbow bull next to a hellfire preacher in 2006 was a real artist. The person cutting magazines apart at the kitchen table at midnight is a real artist.
The fidelity was never the point. The making was the point. It was always the point.