Blog #12: About MEEeee! New Pictures New Pictures

So rather than do an entry about an artist I'm gonna do a bit about me. Me, me me me me. A bit of an artistic bio if you will.

Like oh so many artists, I apparently was making stuff as soon as I could pick up my own poop. My mother tells me I was a nightmare in the bathroom. Those white rooms were my artistic playground. After the fecal matter came her makeup and soon she realized i was destined for great things. So she bought me a box of crayons.

While I cannot honestly speak for myself. I'm told that I never went through a stick figure stage but instead I drew blobs of colors and shapes which resembled people. I never overlapped my figures but always made room for them. Like if I colored the grass, I'd always leaves uncolored gaps for the bunnies. My art also informed my mother that I was a bit of a...fancy child..shall we call it? My favorite subject matters were rainbows, fairies, unicorns, mermaids, princesses...etc. Despite the fact that I drew fictional things, I was always very adiment about proportion, perspective, distance, reality....as much as a 6 year old could be.

circa 1994?

Anyhoo, I outgrew my crayons because my obsession with details became frustrating when I couldn't erase my mistakes. So...i took up pencil. My older sister was an artist and the attention she garnered from her work was what I wanted too.

9 years passed. I used to draw for the love of it. I doodled all the time. I was revered as "the artist" of all my classes. But a traumatic event in 3rd grade changed all that. I was working on an assigned art project during a math lesson. I'm guessing the teacher was having a bad day because he said if I wasn't going to pay attention than maybe I should come up and teach the class. Which me made me do. Made me come up to the blackboard, stand there in horror, and admit that I had no idea what to do. I don't know why he was so testy that day. He had never yelled at me before and I was always being told how great a student I was.

my version circa 2000

So I've been scarred for life. From that point on, no more doodling for me. And even in highschool I looked down upon other kids that doodled because they weren't paying attention. But for some reason this didn't deter my knack. I was 13...almost 14 when I did a replica of the nude portrait from TITANIC. It garnered a lot of attention and was mostly deemed as "inappropriate" by the community. I don't know what clicked but I suddenly understood the use of shading and rendering. From then on, my drawing style has remained relatively the same. Sadly, I've lost the creative juices I once had but I like to think that my latest art class is helping there. I'm still snobbish toward the work that goes into it but I'm loving the endless possibilities of ways to send ideas. I'm continuously trying to replicate nature and immortalize beauty, visually. Now I am beginning to understand how to capture it intellectually. I turned down going to art school because a part of me was too arrogant to believe that anyone could teach me anything. Clearly, I have yet a long way to go.