When some people want to learn to draw, they do it the “right” way. They take a drawing class, watch youtube videos, or buy a book – starting from the basics. I did no such thing and hopped straight to simply drawing what I see, even if the drawings turned out nothing like the actual object.
In a way art is practicing some form of tolerance: to tolerate the gap between what we can do and the actual outcome we imagined. I have always been good at tolerating this gap when it comes to my creative practices, that is why I can keep writing these posts, and why I was a good prototyper. If we keep getting hung up on the details or keep being frustrated by not being able to achieve what we can imagine, we would go nowhere. Some people are very motivated by this frustration and use it to perfect their skills, some people will give up early in their journey because they are unable to tolerate this frustration. I belong to neither, because for some reason unclear to myself I am not motivated by perfection, neither do I get very frustrated when there is a gap. I think it is because I have a baseline apathy towards life, and it permeates everything.
I do have very low tolerance for repetition, and to get good at traditional drawing skills one must be able to tolerate drawing the same thing repeatedly. For example, one of the most basic exercises is to draw lines repetitively. Drawing involves a lot of motor skill, and that will train our hands to have the muscle memory required for drawing steady lines.
But if I were to start with drawing hundreds of the same lines repeatedly in my drawing journey, my inclination to draw anything would dissipate immediately. So it all boils down to what do I really want out of my drawing journey?
For many people they equate proficiency in art with technical skills. We are deemed to be good at drawing only if we can draw an object as realistic as the original. For me being good at art and being good at technical drawing are two different things, though it is difficult to separate them in this society. We can draw the most realistic drawing but it evokes no emotion, provoking nothing.
But I don’t aspire to be good at art either. Same like I don’t aspire to be good at writing. Of course I wasn’t always this way, but after years of thinking about what do I really want out of my own life, I have repeatedly came to the same realisation what I want is not societal-perceived greatness. What I truly want to simply to exist as the self I am. But of course who the hell I am is a deeply philosophical question that I am continually asking and do not have answers to. All I have are inclinations which I also have to discern if they are truly mine or are they part of my conditioning. Maybe there is no such thing as “truly mine” in an existence that is interdependent on everything else. Maybe we can only seek out what feels as close to our perceived nature as we can get. And that nature changes throughout time as we transform, and perhaps we have to intellectually and philosophically decide what matters to us, in order to develop our nature in that direction.
So I guess art for me, apart from being an meditation exercise, is a continuous existential search. I don’t know who I am so I am hoping my art can bring me closer. My writing serves a similar purpose. There are plenty of times when I don’t really know what I am going to write until I actually sit and write. Writing for me requires going into a light meditative state, and somehow it is able to access somewhere deeper into my consciousness to surface thoughts I am not consciously aware of. So I am learning about myself as I write, sometimes it helps to crystallise an abstract feeling.
It is similar with creating art. Once in a long while the creation exceeds my imagination. It helps that I have very low expectations. My skills are very uneven – if you can call them skills in the first place – so most of the time I have no idea how something is going to turn out. If you have a certain skill level you may roughly know what something is going to look like when you draw it. Since my skills are all over the place, the outcomes are also all over the place. Looking at my art tumblr my art has almost zero consistency, which may bother some people but it is fascinating to me.
We can’t measure or document the transformation of our inner consciousness, it is so esoteric. But making art is one way to see an inkling of it. There is an unexplainable intuitive autonomic process guiding us. To me, being formally trained impedes this. Instead of making art spontaneously, we get caught up in trying to make it “right”, whatever right means. I can be a very rigid person, so it is difficult for me to sit down and just let it flow. So every successful attempt to make art represents a successful overcoming for me, where I overcome many different and difficult parts of myself to access some deep hidden part of me. I am constantly knowing myself through my art, and it is a sort of knowing that is not crystallised like my writing, but a knowing that is primal, creative and wordless.
A lot of what I do is cerebral: writing, reading, thinking. Drawing is one of the very few things that feels non-cerebral to me. So I want to keep on doing it even though as of now I don’t actually enjoy it. In order to keep on doing it, it must remain lightweight and feel easy – something that is a de-stressing activity instead of feeling like it adds on to my chronic tension and anxiety.
I am not there yet though. It still feels daunting and difficult. But at the very least I am not making it worse by forcing some standards or conventions on myself. I hope one day it starts to feel fun and enjoyable to me. If not it is at least something that develops my capacity to be patient.
I have been on an ipad drawing phase lately:
I did this on affinity designer, a vector-drawing program. What I like about it is that we can use the apple pencil to draw vector-based art, and it allows the manipulation of vector points like a traditional vector illustration program. So it is very forgiving: I can draw an extremely crooked line but smoothen it later by manipulating the vector points. I can also delete and redo anything I want. Colours can be reapplied infinite times, unlike watercolour. I could probably draw the above much more precisely if I wanted to, I could also use fonts instead of drawing the text, but I opted to keep it squiggly and uneven like an actual drawing.
Looking at my ipad drawing on top of this post versus the latest one, I realised I have come a long way (though it is an unfair comparison because the former is done in apple notes, which is a lot less forgiving). These are two imprints of my selves at different points in time. I have records of my selves in my writing, and then the drawings express a different representation of me.
After completing this digital drawing I realised I prefer actual paper and ink for now. I don’t like the forgiving quality of digital art – I think mistakes are part of the experience. Without the ability to rectify them I can observe the change in my drawings more. And more importantly, everything demands I look at a screen these days. I can’t bear to look at more screens.
But without going through this ipad phase, I wouldn’t know where I stand on my own preferences. But who knows? I may return to the ipad again one day, or try to do something on e-ink.