#tumblr diary my old friend i have come to chat with your void again

[notcatherinemorland]

one of the most difficult things about getting back into art again is not romanticising my own skill gap.

like, finally, after 5 1/2 years of thinking these it was destroyed and shat on by rats, we found my portfolio of my old Big Serious Art Works. Most of it is in there, minus a sketchbook and some old final pieces (annoying!) but what is genuinely shocking to me is how good some of it is. I remember hating some of those pieces viscerally. I remember nearly crying to my friends about dropping out of art gcse over an a3 charcoal illustration of onions.... and it nearly made me cry over how good it was for a 13-year-old. Over how good it would be if i produced it now. That's not even to mention how it feels to see my two favourite sketches I ever did (ink sketch figure drawing and a charcoal cathedral window, for posterity).

What is fascinating to me now its that this is a legitimately good portfolio. Detailed sketchbooks explaining my processes; extremely varied material use and pieces at the end; composition and style and ideas are abundant. It is positively surreal to walk back through the fucking verdant greenhouse of my youthful training and then look at my last two sketchbooks... which are dull as dishwater. It's just soft and scared little portraits over and over and over again.

But the thing is: all my work is soft and scared. All of it, from the sketchbook of copic ciao-coloured magical girl anime designs I drew at 12 to the oil pastel picture of a washing machine I've been trying to start for the last 2 days. The reason my old work makes such a lush impression is because it was for academia - I had teachers forcing my hand into new every single week. These same teachers offering suggestions and guidance at every stage of the work, who genuinely cared about my making art, not just my getting good marks. It is very hard to flip through my recent books (oh, how I am proud I get to say books, plural) and see such a dearth of discipline. I knew I found it very hard, psychologically, to challenge myself, but I didn't think it was this.... obvious, in a way. I didn't realise how I had been showing my hands with the things they've created.

Anyway: there's no satisfying answer to this. I cannot afford to look back on my old works and think I was talented - it was 5 years of dedicated, cultivated, nurtured skills. I cannot afford to look back on my recent works and think of them as silly, bland, and uninspired. At the same time, I cannot afford to not challenge myself. My art will be soft and scared whatever I do - I may as well make it good.

#me meta #tumblr diary my old friend i have come to chat with your void again #i start a 5 week course of figure drawing next week & i am so excited for it i can't even explain!!!!!! #the skill gap between my eyes and my hand is fucking cavernous but like. doesn't mean i should stop!!! #it just means i gotta get all the shit out the way so i can develop them in tandem again #a level art shaped me for better or worse lmaoooo