Songs to Play at my Funeral

A little something about me….I have this love hate relationship with art and creativity.  I am not a fan of failing and specifically, if I try something and it doesn’t work, I have a very hard time convincing myself to take a step back and try again or in the case of sketching, simply erasing what didn’t work and try again.  That sounds like a logical resolution to a relatively simple problem.  Draw something – not what you had in mind – erase – draw again – get result you were looking for.  Instead, for me it is draw something – not what I had in mind – crumple paper – never try that idea again.  Not a great way to learn or evolve as an artist.  As I understand it successful people in any field, art or otherwise, have had countless failures before they found success.  So my logical brain says “Press on”, but my emotional brain says “You are a loser and can’t draw anymore.  It was fun while it lasted. Hang it up. You’re finished.”

So, why do I say all this, I can only assume that with my pencil drawings I hit the proverbial wall, had a few fails and convinced myself that I am no longer the artist I once was when it comes to pencil sketches, crumpled the paper and walked away.  I say “can only assume” because I honestly can’t pinpoint that moment or decision to stop drawing.  I just know that I did stop.

In thinking back about when I started to try to draw with colored pencils and paint, I think it coincides with the birth of Hailey, our oldest daughter in 1992.  Especially when you look at the drawings and paintings and they are all cartoons and mostly characters in The Lion King and The Little Mermaid (popular movies at the time) and some characters from when I was a kid and earlier, like Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Bugs (no last name required).  This was a fun era for me and a realization (and perhaps reminder) that maybe I am an OK artist after all.  My Goofy drawing feels like a convenient handoff from my sketching period to my color phase.  The drawing is mostly black and white with his tongue being red colored pencil.  Not intentional by any stretch, but there is a nice symbiotic relationship there of the passing of the baton from pencil to color.  These paintings and drawings hung on our walls as well, like the sketches I mentioned in Chapter 1.  I am proud of the fact that these were good enough to put on display.  Again, I know they are not world changing and likely would not have even won awards at the fair, but they were my creations, and they were something from nothing (a theme I might be repeating as this journal goes on), 

Here are some of them from this era:

If I had to guess (and I don’t know for sure, so yeah, this is a guess) I probably only painted for a few years and by the mid 1990’s we were about to have our second daughter Hannah.  Hannah was born in 1996 and the next several years were dedicated to raising our two girls and focusing 100% on that.  Art took a back seat and was replaced with a lot of camcorder work and still photos capturing the growth of our two beautiful girls.  Since this story is mostly about my pursuit of artistic expression, I can say that there wasn’t much activity over the next several years, artistically.