art is hard for me. god, i feel my brain bleeding every time i try and it’s so painful and just getting through it without throwing a tantrum and feeling sorry for myself is a feat. but i do it. i have reasons.
the last thing i worked on in the studio was bamboo, in a traditional japanese style with higgins black ink.
i work slowly. i forget what i’m doing. and i don’t really understand how to work in this way. my teacher keeps telling me that i’m trying to use my right brain and it’s fucking me up, which may be a nice way to say i’m an art retard, or she may be right. but with teh bamboo project, i kinda flowed, it happened for me. you have to work fast with ink, so i didn’t have a chance, once i had water on the paper, to trip myself up with indecisiveness. and what’s on the paper is what you’re stuck with so you have to work with it. it was a good exercise for me.
what i really want to learn, what i set out to learn and still haven’t, is rendering. i still suck at it. it bugs me. it discourages me. so with this ink i had to work so differently, i guess i didn’t have a chance to get bugged by imperfections. three classes i took to do this thing, which is kind of the antithesis of working fast, but it’s actually fast for me.
first two classes i was happy. it was like when i first started getting interested in this shit. i zoned out and the next thing i knew my time slot was over and i had to go home.
the third time i took it out and realized it sucked. i worked, but my teacher had to keep nudging me to keep it moving. she’s telling me it’s great, it’s full of life, i have so much character and it’s showing in the work and it’s the best ink work she’s seen in… i stopped listening because it was dildos. i said so. having never seen metalocalypse, she thought i was likening my giant bamboo shoots to dildos. i did not explain.
i guess it’s fitting, now that i write it out, how like a child i felt that day. disappointed in what i had been having such a good time making. having felt i guess like a child those other two days, thinking it would not suck.
i’m new to all this. i had her explain the rest of the process and i tried to choke back my disillusionment and bang it out so i can get to the next project.
both she and the other teacher, himself under 25 years old, commented on how great it was. how alive and full of personality and how any shitbag can execute stuff precisely right, but i made a work of art, blah blah. it was dildos. i liked it with the lights off. they sympathized, advised me to tuck it away and look at it again in a month. but both insisted it rocked anyway.
it was still wet but i carried my picture of dildos home, flat horizontal, embarrassed to leave it in the studio, and feeling obliged to store it with the other shit i’ve done that doesn’t suck. or maybe it does. maybe i do and fuck all this shit anyway. it was a long walk. i was muttering about the platitudes i’d heard. about how the lack of skill shows how good the work is, because any asshole can execute and all that. about the bamboo being alive. about my drawing having motion and life and “character.” i didn’t want to learn about character, i had that already. i don’t need to learn life. that dildos drawing was not what i went there for. i wanted to learn what that teacher refuses to teach, the tricks as she calls them. i want accuracy. i’ll then put life in the shit if i want, but for now, i want nothing to do with life or character, i want my shit dead. stark, cold, unrelenting reality. i’ll do with it what i see fit.
all the while i’m also thinking about how unbelievably hard this is for me. and how nothing is ever going to get easier. and how i sit in the studio next to fifteen year olds who don’t have to think about what they’re doing and how my teacher keeps talking about how years and years of education ruins the brain and how brave it is to be a beginner and all the middle aged housewives who took classes in the community college with me and all the instructors who commended them for their bravery, and where am i going to find the time to invest the double-normal time it will take to accomplish anything? why the fuck bother? unless i’m some kind of prodigy, and i’m not, i’ll be 70 by the time i’m noticeably better than anyone else, much less be where i want to be.
upon walking in the house, my daughter got excited at the drawing. “it’s great!” before i’m even in the door, and she goes to look at her own art to compare. the Man says “is it supposed to look like that?” and gets me a drink. i’m still pissed but try to forget it. i lay the dildos flat to dry. then i prop it up while i continue to converse and drink, with all that muttering still chattering away in my head as i do so.
i start playing with the fucking thing that’d been in my throat for like a week. it’s hanging there, i feel it on the back of my tongue like all the time. i got up and took care of it once and for all. it took a lot of poking and fingering, but i eventually squeezed it loose, and it tumbled out of my mouth onto the sink. the size was amazing. the color and shape looked like a tiny brain. and it stunk. bad. it amazed me. i kept looking and looking with my flashlight at the hole it came out of, in sheer amazement. my family was not interested. 
it’s called a tonsililoth and it’s smelly and i’m glad it’s out of me. this was days ago and i still look in admiration at the gaping hole in my throat it came from. doesn’t it look like a little shit-smelling brain?
later, my daughter’s neil gaiman book caught my eye for a second, which made me think about sandman, which made me think “the only way i want my bamboo alive is if it’s the last shit alive on earth.” and i look up, and there it was. my post apocalyptic dildos were rising from soot, in the glare of a full moon. which is when i got what my teacher was saying. no one but me would have drawn it like that. it was a hybrid sumi-e/cartoon. it was wrong in the ways i’m wrong.
so i didn’t have to wait a month. it took a few hours.
i’ll share if you don’t say mean things.
