Art has many forms. This can be music, movies, books, videos, photography, really anything but everyone sees it different. For me art in its many forms has helped me over the years. Sometimes it has been thru a book that let me escape reality for a while, a movie that took my mind off things or let my imagination soar, or a song that expresses the pain, joy, love or whatever other emotion I am going thru at the time.
And sometimes it was a way to get an idea out and into the real world so it isn’t taking up the real estate that is my mind. One example of this was when I took some old footboards and made a coffee table out of it, which is still in my living room. It took me years upon to even get to the point of trying anything art related and here is why.
When I was young like many kids I loved to color, draw, make things from playdough, etc. But since it was something that I enjoyed my father took every chance he could to put me down and tell me it looked like shit or I was no artist. And this continued in my head as I got older but I vividly remember being in the 5th grade and we had art class. There was another boy in class that was much better than me and loved to rub it in my face especially with anything that was graded. Then the next year he rode the bus with me and would torment me daily about how I couldn’t draw anything. See drawing was always an escape but I had the love taken out of me for art for years and I was very bitter toward it for a long time. One day this boy got under my skin and threatened to beat me up if I kept “faking being an artist”, what he meant by this was I somehow managed to get my dad to buy me an $8 t-shirt with M.C. Escher design on the front It was the staircase one and in black (Still one of my favorite t-shirt colors), I know what you thinking $8 big deal we spend more on Coffee sometimes. Well this was a big deal to me because most of my clothing came from donations at the church, from the Salvation Army or from birthdays and Christmas gifts. New clothes every so often or for the new school year came from Kmart or Walmart, the thought of getting a t-shirt from a music store was out of the question. So now you have some context. Now back to the story, another side note is physically I was chubby, short for my age, wore glasses(remember the big square one with the bar connecting them, yep I had those in bright shiny brass), wearing clothes normally that are leftovers and out of style, etc. Well the boy was tall, long dark hair, black leather jacket, etc. So of course I don’t want to get my ass kicked by this kid at school because I was pretty sure he was serious. Well I was telling my mom and my dad overheard. Well this lead to him beating me telling me I shouldn’t be drawing anyway because it looked like shit and I wasn’t any good. He took my art supplies and the shirt and threw it away. He told me there he solved the problem of the kid kicking my ass not drawing and if he caught me he was going to break my hand so I couldn’t draw again. He never broke my hand but he tried, I can’t count the times after that if he saw me even make a little scribble he would hit my hand with whatever he had handy, a board, a belt, wooden spoon, book, whatever. After a while you quit drawing and to this day my skills aren’t even where they were back then but I don’t have any of that art. The closest I have is the tattoo on my chest that was a copy from a drawing I did when I started to explore drawing again but that is a different story that I am not ready to tackle at time to tell.
It has taken me decades, a divorce, lots of alcohol and depression to bring back my artistic side. I still can’t draw, I haven’t tried painting more than a wall one color in years, and my woodworking is more fix stuff now than functional. But I have found my love for art and expressing myself again with it thru the use of technology. I still have a ton of the negative thoughts and voices telling me I’m wrong, I suck, it looks like shit, etc and I am going to be working on overcoming this and I will be sharing some of my art on the page and when I have some extra cash I will be exploring more mediums of expression.