Do you ever read something, or see a piece of art, and feel so deeply affected, that you think, “I want to write! I want to make art!”? This happens to me all the time, every day. I want to spend as much of my life as possible feeling the way I feel when I am moved by art, and so the natural progression is that I should make art myself.
The problem — or, one of the several problems — is that I’m not an artist. I will never be a writer like the writers I admire; I don’t have grand ideas for fictions or essays, nor the patience develop them. I blog and I journal for the pleasure of the act of writing, and that is enough. I have accepted this. I will not be a Donna Tartt or a Zadie Smith or any of the masters of language and storytelling I so admire, and that is okay. To enjoy anything for the act of doing it rather than for the product it creates is a gift.
But I do want to create. I crave it. Over the past few weeks I’ve been edging towards drawing again. There’s more daylight now. I could do it at the end of my workday to unwind. Yet I haven’t. At the end of the day, I want quiet: a quiet brain. At the end of the day, I often feel the most I can do is to stand at the window and look out, or to pick up the deck of cards and play a couple of rounds of solitaire.
It seems it would also be easy to draw, if only I could remember to. I don’t have to be good. Maybe that’s what’s stopping me — it feels like I need energy to draw because it will take effort to be decent at it and not get frustrated.
When I was in Halifax last week for a work meetup, we went to an art museum together. I was struck by the joy in one of the artist’s works, Maud Lewis. When I looked at her paintings, the overwhelming feeling I felt was merriment. This woman felt free when she made this. She had fun with paint. I want to relax and be free and just have fun with pens and pencils and maybe one day paint.
Butterfly Mind 