Artistic Journey

Finding my way back to art after deciding not to do art as a career has been interesting. Even if trying to do art full-time depresses me, I still have an inherent need to create. I feel much better when I regularly take the time to express myself visually.

If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

After completing undergrad in Florida, I had the task of moving to upstate New York for grad school. This entailed going through the many art pieces, sketchbooks, and journals that I had made throughout the years. This process elicited emotions ranging from confusion (so much of what I wrote/drew was nonsensical) and disgust (or borderline disturbing) to inspiring. It’s a strange feeling to inspire yourself from the past.

Focusing on the pieces that uplifted me instead of making me cringe, I have collected them onto an Art page and will describe my artistic journey here.

Editorial Illustration and Education

After high school, I became inspired by editorial illustrators like Victo Ngai and Emiliano Ponzi. I fell in love with editorial illustration as a craft: art that can be eye-catching, but also a glimpse into the themes of the article that the illustrator was commissioned to advertise for. I loved the way that they combined symbols in unexpected ways.

Around this time, there was a heat wave in the UK that was leading to deaths, because the buildings were not equipped with air conditioning and generally not designed for such high temperatures. This event had the potential illustration elements of heat and buildings, which could be combined in a novel way: Big Ben melting. In a world of increasing temperatures, the reliability of our infrastructure is failing, as if it is becoming lava beneath our feet.

Most of my art pieces at this time focused around education. These pieces were inspired by my frustration with the lack of self-awareness I had at the time and blaming the lack of autonomy provided to students by the public school system. I felt that the emphasis on standardized testing was a hinderance to self-discovery of students and the creativity of teachers’ lesson plans. It was a mundane process of memorize, regurgitate, and repeat.

This was the time period when I made this fun piece as well, which suggests diverging into a creative and whimsical journey.

Dreams

When I was 14 years old, I started keeping a dream journal. If you decide to keep a dream journal, you have to commit to writing your dreams in the first moments when you open your eyes. Dreams are time-sensitive. The second you wake up, they start slipping away. In the haze inbetween waking-and-sleeping, your handwriting or phone-typing dexterity may be terrible, but making the effort to record them can be valuable.

What I learned by studying the work of editorial illustrators was how to combine elements and symbols in unexpected ways. We are naturally better at this in our dreams. We easily make unexpected connections in our dreams, which is why hearing somebody else describe their dream sounds scattered, even if it makes perfect sense to them.

After recording a dream (and snoozing for a while longer), the record you keep can become inspiration for later drawings.

Dreams are a playground where your subconscious mind enacts scenarios. It allows you to face the things you are afraid to (nightmares) or achieve the things you desire. Or if you engage in some playful visualization while falling asleep, your dreams can become wildly untethered from your walking reality. You can end up dreaming that you are not yourself, but other people, in other ages.

It can be enlightening to analyze the dreams that are especially emotionally intense. The questions I sometimes ask myself are:

• How did I feel during the dream? What in my waking life might be making me feel like that?
• What are the main elements in the dream? Characters, animals, monsters, or the landscape itself? How do these elements make me feel? Do they represent anything from my waking life?

Creative Process

Recently, I have gotten into painting, and have developed a creative process that I find rewarding.

Before changing careers, my creative process would have been “Wake up. Make something beautiful and interesting. Sleep. Repeat.” The only problem was that it wasn’t inspired action. The outcome when I force an art piece, even if it is technically good, is something that people don’t resonate with, and that makes even me sad to look at. Why force ourselves to do anything? Forcing yourself to make art is like an oxymoron.

If you ever go to art fairs, you may notice that some artist’s booths have difficulty attacting people, while others are overflowing with people buying art pieces. The difference is not typically skill, either, but the artist’s vibe. Some artists feel desperate, “Please look at my art. Please buy something. Please stop making me feel like a failure,” while others are uplifting, “Look at what I have made. I hope it uplifts and inspires you.”. This difference is profound. Speaking from experience, it took a lot of failed pieces for me to realize that creating for the sake of getting something out of it, such as validation, is a lost cause.

When you embark to express yourself creatively, make sure it is from not a place of lack or neediness, but a positive desire to share a part of yourself.

Lately my creative process has the following steps:

1. Explore

It is nice to regularly get exposed to different kinds of creative media, be it sci-fi novels, movies, plays, museums, video games, or nature itself. When I do these activities, I regularly take pictures to later use as reference images for art pieces. Occasionally scrolling through websites like Pinterest can also provide inspiration.

2. Create Space

It is difficult to create if you feel crowded or overwhelmed by clutter. For me, this step means cleaning my desk. It is important to free up the space needed in order to create something new. This space can be physical, but also mental by meditating or sitting quietly with calming music.

3. Invoke what you want to create

Define what you desire. What feeling or concept do you want to express? How would it feel to have accomplished sharing this with others?

This part is like sending an invitation in the mail, and then waiting for the RSVP.

4. Wait

Once you have defined what you desire to create, you can now take a step back. From anywhere to a few seconds, or longer time periods, like days or weeks, during which your mind will be working on your idea in the background. At some point you will then get struck with inspiration to create it.

It is like when you are speaking to somebody and they lose their train of thought. Inevitably, the second they give up trying to think of the thought and start taking about something else, it comes back to them. Stepping away allows you to detach from the outcome, and gives time for serendipitous events to occur that may enrich your work.

5. Ride the wave of inspiration

When the impulse to create the desired idea strikes, it’s important to act on it. I find that if I delay and try to come back to create it much later, I usually can’t summon the same level of inspiration that I had before. It feels like surfing. You see a wave come that you want to ride, and if you miss it, you need to wait for the next wave rather than chase after the one you missed. We are constantly growing and changing everyday. The concepts that you find the most compelling today may be different than tomorrow, and that’s okay. Whenever I miss the wave, I simply go back to Step 3.

6. Limit the options

When riding the wave it’s important to prevent overwhelm, frustration, or in general negative emotions that can derail the process. To do this, I tend to think about separating technique from expression. If there is a new medium that I want to try out, I usually work out the kinks with that by doing some studies. That way when I want to create something that has more emotion to it, I feel more confident. I become less preoccupied with the left-side of my brain, making and analyzing mistakes and correcting them, instead allowing the right-side of my brain to utilize the technique as easily as riding a bike. The medium them becomes an extension of yourself that you don’t have to think about how to use.

Achieving a flow state is a balancing act between boredom and anxiety. If you are bored with the media or techniques that you usually use, it could be a sign to try to mix it up. But a complete overhaul can be overwhelming.

Either way, I like to keep the process simple. When I started digital painting in high school, I installed hundreds of specialized Photoshop brushes which led to analysis paralysis. Now I use the simplier software called Krita and limit myself to just two paintbrushes. I maintain that same philosophy when I paint with goauche. You can accomplish a lot with a limited toolset. If a tool feels like it’s weighing you down, let it go.

You can come up with different limitations, such as only using two colors, or limiting a sketch to the small real-estate provided by a post-it note.

7. Feel into it

Art is a visual illusion that is only convincing if you believe it while making it. What feeling are you trying to trasmit? Follow that feeling to the end.

Once you have established a desire to express a certain feeling/idea/concept, and that wave of inspiration comes, there is a relief that follows finishing that work. One of my favorite movie scenes is of music composer Robert Frobisher from Cloud Atlas. He is down on his luck, running out of money and starving, but he obsessively perseveres to complete his magnum opus, the Cloud Atlas Sextet.

The end rushes towards me. Unable to eat, or sleep. Like Ewing, the mortal coil has become a noose. Would rather become music.

“It’s done,” he says, drawing the bold double bar line to complete his composition.

Frobisher is exhausted and relieved, but also changed. The act of creating is a transformative process, leaving you different than when you started. It is this regenerative process that I love about viewing and making art.

It has taken many trials and errors to find a rewarding creative process that is uplifting for myself, and for those who I show my art to. I hope that my perspective inspires you to find your unique way of embarking on an artistic journey of your own. To see my other art pieces, you can vist my Art page.