Making it
the donuts
Why do I create?
My creative life goes far enough back that I can’t fully pinpoint when it started. This also has to do with the way things like this tend to happen as a process and not as a single event. My earliest creative memory was noticing how I could consciously choose the words I used in conversation to affect the direction of that conversation. To speak is so ingrained in our day-to-day lives that we forget how complex the use of language actually is. The number of elements being modified, sorted, categorized and expressed, along with the choice of volume, tone, intended effect, is staggering. Add in the the ability (or lack thereof) of the speaker to anticipate a possible outcome of the words as they come out of their mouth, and it is starts to become clear just how complicated it is to conduct a successfully meaningful conversation.
I don’t remember when I took to drawing. I know I drew from a very young age because I’ve seen some of the drawings my family saved. My first memory of drawing with something akin to self-awareness, however, goes back to elementary school. I was drawing a shoe in art class. I don’t remember the assignment, but I remember drawing the Adidas soccer shoe I was wearing. I probable remember this because kids started coming around and watching me draw. I heard a some of them saying things like — How-do-you-do-that? —and other similar things. I also remember thinking that you just do it. You look at the thing and you make lines on paper until they start to look like the thing. In other words it seemed obvious to me how I did it, like it was just something you do.
Now, when I watch someone who is genuinely great at drawing, instead of thinking “How do you do that?” I think, how do you find the time to focus so much on doing only that for so long over such a long period of time?
That whole conversation leads into the topic of technique, which I find boring, so, we won’t go there. In other words, with reference to making art, hard work and skill can be massively important, but it sure as hell isn’t everything. Just ask Dee Dee Ramone.
My father was/is a visual artist, and I have no doubt that this plays a huge role in my creative life (for numerous reasons). His meticulously thought out and finely crafted oil paintings have a stark beauty that to me rings instantly recognizable. For several of my childhood years, when we lived in France, he maintained a studio in our home. He was in there fairly often from my recollection. But he doesn’t paint anymore. After we left Europe and returned to the states, his creative output waned to the point of becoming nonexistent over the course of several years.
On a cross country drive many years ago (in a rare moment of vulnerability), he told me how he had wanted to make a living as a painter but that his decision to raise a family meant (to him) that he needed a reliable job to support us. Being a painter for a living was, and still very much is, a tough racket.
Why he stopped creating outright, though, is more complicated, and only he can speak to that.
My uncle on my mother’s side is a very good electric guitarist. He plays guitar much like my father painted: extremely detail oriented, with an almost monastic focus. Much like my father, when my uncle graduated from high school, he intended to begin a career in the arts. But as he says, the Vietnam War reared its evil head, and rather than be drafted into a war he didn’t believe in, he chose instead to take a college deferment and got himself a degree. Unlike my father, my uncle continued playing guitar right on up until we went in different direction in our respective lives. But I have no doubt he still plays.
In my own life I have put a lot of effort into my own creative work, mostly drawing, playing music, and writing.
And despite all my efforts, I have at times temporarily abandoned them all for varying lengths of time. For example, I haven’t drawn at all for over a year, I am super burned out on my music, and I vacillate back and forth with pushing hard with my writing.
I am a streaky creator. I can go on years-long bursts of obsessive output, driven as if there is some sort of fire burning inside me, and I can just as easily ignore the same practice completely for years on end. Actually, I do this with many things, not just the arts. My wife has suggested that I may suffer from an attention deficit disorder, and I might, though I’ve yet to check into it (probably a sign I have one). I suspect that much of what stunts my ability to remain consistent (consistent like those I admire the most) is psychological.
Many of my favorite creators are the ones who work the hardest, the ones who say that if they didn’t create, their lives would be over, and mean it. These people are so singularly focused on one thing for their entire life that they have no genuine interest in much of anything that doesn’t feed that thing. I am not one of those people, not consistently anyway. My interests and energy get pulled in so many directions. Sometimes I wish I was like those people. But, I’m just not.
In a sense, living a life can be compared to sculpture. You have a lump of raw material, and then you chip and hack away at it until you find something in there you can live with. Sometimes you trash it and start all over again, and sometimes you strike gold and actually like the end result. And then you start another one.
I don’t know exactly what it is that I’m searching so hard for in my life, but I know for certain that I haven’t found it. I’m always looking, obsessively, it’s what propels me forward, but it’s such an evasive goal. The constant searching is my Moby Dick, my ONE THING. I see my art through this kind of lens. I search my reality for meaning, and I try to express those results, translate the internal process, the way it affects me, the way I want it to affect others, through art. Sometimes I feel I get closer than others, but I will never ARRIVE.
And when I get down to it, that’s why I create. I desperately want to get to that place, the impossible place that can’t exist, and every time I try I get a little bit closer than before.