Art, my Archnemesis

A good friend was kind enough to give me some pointers on what supplies I needed to start sketching. I haven't used a real pencil in decades so it was a little odd for me to nip into the nearby art supply store and pick out pencils. I also got an eraser, a sharpener and a pencil case to hold everything. Brings back memories of when I was a small child going to school. At the start of every school year, my Mom and I would go shopping for school supplies. I'd get glorious boxes of pencils, colour pencils, jotters, rulers...the whole lot. The best parts were the pencil cases which many hidden compartments and the erasers which were scented like cream biscuits. It was a glorious time to be a kid. *sigh*

Warning: this is a whiny post. I'm fully aware that I'm whining. If you don't care for that, stop here please.

I hated Art when I was in school. My strengths lay in language and science subjects which was fine because I grew up in a "streamed" education system - depending on the results from government-administered standardized tests, you were put into a particular stream of education focusing on specific areas. Where you were put also determined your social status in school: Science stream was where the best reside and Arts stream was where they put the useless and dumb. It didn't help that I was utterly hopeless in Art...at least that was what I was repeatedly told then. Looking back at that time of my life, I would have to say that the teachers committed a grave sin treating their students that way. I'm not sure what kind of pressures they were under or by whom, but it was obvious that they wanted to concentrate on just the best students in their area. Art teachers were also the lowest on the staff totem pole. Perhaps they felt no one cared what they did, so they ran their classes like their personal fiefdoms and tried to derive some joy out of coaching the best artists. For myself, it became clear early on that I couldn't draw a straight line to save my life. I can remember spending pretty much my entire primary and secondary education years languishing in a corner during Art because those of us "not good enough" were left unsupervised for the period as long as we didn't make too much noise. The teachers didn't care. I learnt nothing.

Even through the neglect, I remember being particularly proud of a watercolour I did when I was about 14 years or so for a midterm exam. The teacher told us the questions beforehand so we could prepare for them, I chose the one titled "Nightmare" and we had free rein to paint whatever we wanted. I hated spiders, so I decided to do that instead. Seriously, I *hated* spiders; they still bring a free stab of fear in me whenever I see one, even now. Regardless, I spent hours poring over books and watching the spiders in the house despite my fear and distaste of them. The exam came and I did my best. I was really quite proud of it, even managing to get the mandibles and the hairy body done just right while keeping (I thought) a nightmarish atmosphere with glowing red eyes dead center, menacing the viewer.

I got a failing grade. As it turns out, the "best" students all got As and the rest of us got Fs. There wasn't intermediate grades in between - you got an A or a F. It was a midterm exam; the grades weren't counted as official so the teacher could get away with whatever they wanted. To this day, I don't know if my teacher even looked at my painting before she failed me. I never did get my painting back. I wish I did.

After that, I didn't bother drawing for decades until my sister was having our kids (long complicated story, won't go into it now). We were all tired and harried then but I still drew little dragon sketches of her and the little ones to keep her spirits up through the pregnancy (she loves dragons). I tried giving them some facial expression too - I remember drawing one with my sis (her dragon form) in the centre with her two baby dragons to either side, one sleeping and the other with a sleepy but mischievous look on his face. I thought they were cute. My sis didn't seem to notice them at all, so I stopped drawing after a while. I remember being deeply hurt then; actually, as I'm typing this, I'm finding that my eyes are tearing up badly so I guess it still hurts now.

I know I'm not a good artist. I also know that not all art is appreciated. But when you have an audience of one and you put a lot of love and effort and care into it but it still gets ignored, one cannot help but feel very small and worthless.

Despite all that, I'm trying again. Given my past history with Art, I'm half expecting it to end in tears again. The more cynical side of me informs me that I am an idiot of the greatest degree for opening myself up for more hurt and disappointment. So why am I bothering? Well, because I'm going through a lot right now and as such, I have a lot of emotions pent up. As I mentioned to my friend, the journalling (and blogging) helps but there are some emotions that the written word simply fails to express properly. So I'm turning to sketching. I have no idea where this is going to lead, if any place at all. I do hope that this time, it'll take me somewhere I've never been before. That would be grand.

But I'm keeping my box of Kleenex handy, just in case history repeats itself.