My Complicated Relationship With the Visual Arts
I.
When I was in high school, I attended a magnet school for the arts, which meant that around 70% of the students had auditioned for competitive admission to a specialized program in theatre, visual arts, dance, music, or creative writing. This meant that there were often two versions of each art course: there was the version of the course intended for (and restricted to) the students studying in that discipline, and there was the general version, intended for everyone.
I attended the school as a creative writing student, but in grade nine, I decided to also take the general introduction to visual arts course. By chance, a lot of the people I became friends with that year were actually in the visual arts program, and were thus taking the visual arts version of the course. Thanks to my association with them, my participation in visual arts events (fashion show, art battles), and the way I obsessively carried a sketchbook around, other students typically assumed I was a visual arts student.
I was vaguely flattered by it, but also not a fan. Something in me hated being mischaracterized, and quite honestly, still does. The frustration about the mischaracterization was on multiple levels: frustration about no one caring about my program, frustration at being mistaken for being in a different program, and general frustration that people assumed I was in the visual arts program simply because of the things I did and the people I associated with. In hindsight, it was a little unfair of me to feel that way: they were legitimate associations, and it wasn’t their fault. However, and most importantly, I think the ultimate reason I got frustrated was because, well, I wasn’t an artist.
At the very least, I didn’t feel like an artist and refused to refer to myself as being one.
I wasn’t an artist, but a person who carried a sketchbook.
I remember telling this to my art teacher, and while curious about my thoughts on it, she wasn’t pleased, either. She briefly tried to convince me otherwise: “if you make art, you’re an artist”, and all that jazz. But I disagreed. My sketches weren’t art, they were drawings. And even when I did make “art”, the act of doing so didn’t automatically make me an “artist”. “Art” and “artist” weren’t mutually inclusive. Just because someone else called me an “artist” didn’t mean I had to. Just because someone else called a drawing “art” didn’t mean I should. In my mind, there was a deep and fundamental distinction.
In the end, I doubt she agreed with me, but she quit trying to convince me she was right.
II.
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with visual art; I’ve often struggled with whether or not to call myself “an artist”, and wondered whether or not anything I do has real “artistic value”. For example, there’s a subset of my visual works that I refer to as my “disaster art”. This is a term that mostly exists in my head; while “questionable” and “disastrous” are both well-loved in the lexicon of words I use to describe, or rather, criticize, my art (the two are oft entwined), I try not to refer to it as “disaster art” in normal conversation. I don’t want to actually use the term because for once, it’s not quite a legitimate critique of the work. While the critical undertone is still there, because I can’t help but be self-critical, I use the term “disaster art” as a kind of defensive irony, as a kind of reverse psychology that will somehow make me feel like what I’m doing is okay. It’s a cheeky term, but there’s real insecurity hidden in it, too. It’s my attempt to grapple with the feeling of making art that has no real artistic value.
The works I call “disaster art” have in common that they’re (for the most part) terrible, true, but mostly that they’re all low-effort standalone works that exist purely for the sake of existing and have little to no artistic legitimacy otherwise. It’s fundamentally different from a sketchbook: sketchbooks are for practice, planning, visual notetaking, journaling, art making, whatever you want them to be. And it’s not the same as making art for yourself - you don’t do that expecting it to be bad. Disaster art is more than that - it’s zero effort nonsense that pretends it’s meant to be displayed.
My collection of disaster art mostly consists of acrylic paintings. The idea was to use a medium I was bad at so I would feel empowered to make anything, and you know what, it worked. I didn’t know what I was doing, so why bother with trying? Acrylic is fast, and you can paint over things entirely, and you can just throw paint on there (hey it’ll look bad but at least it’ll have texture), so you can just tape down a sheet of paper and half an hour later you’ll have… something. Probably a waste of paper, and probably a waste of paint. I spent months making a series of those paintings, and when my family saw them, they thought I was crazy.
The thing is, disaster art is fun. It rarely goes well, but that’s the point, and it’s never polished, which is also the point. Plus, peel off the tape and sign the corner, and everything is legitimate now. Or, at the very least, it feels valued by me.
III.
My phase of claiming “not to be an artist” in high school was complete bullshit, mind you. Like most kids, I started making art pretty much as soon as I could breathe. I had the standard crayon scribbling phase; I made puzzles from cereal box cardboard and built nonsensical machines and illustrated my own little hand-made books; I taught myself to knit and made jewelry and crocheted flowers and learned needlepointing. When I reached middle school age, I built dioramas and made tiny miniatures and attempted to draw fashion figures to illustrate my dubious clothing designs. I became obsessed with making elaborately detailed drawings of running shoes, developed a taste for the more abstract side of art, and started exploring the kind of ridiculously time-consuming, precise, and repetitive processes that are the hallmark of my visual art today.
In high school, I carried my sketchbook literally everywhere and drew voraciously; I probably experimented more with mediums than I ever have since. If you define an “artist” as a person who makes art, then I was definitely an artist. When I presented my ninth-grade art teacher with my claim of “not being an artist”, this is the argument she presented me with. But I didn’t feel like the drawings in my sketchbook were really art, and I didn’t feel like my other work was good enough to really be called art. When I insisted on this, she dropped it. But we never really agreed.
The problem with my claim was that while it wasn’t accurate by any kind of literal definition, it was 100% emotionally true. Sure, I started making art as a kid, and sure, I never stopped. But unlike most of the other kids who never stopped, my drawing skills were not great. Part of this was the fact that I was (and still am) very scattered: I had multiple interests, and I split my time between pursuing all of them. But the other reason was that I never bothered seriously trying to improve my skills. Like, obviously, I wanted to get better, but not at the cost of the several hours of disciplined practice the average artist puts in.
In elementary school, you always know who the art kids are: they’re the kids who spend all their time drawing, and are somehow already amazing at it, and whose work everyone is amazed by when the teacher inevitably forces the class to draw stuff. I spent a lot of time being jealous of those kids, and generally wished I were that good, but not enough to like, go out and do it. When I’m feeling particularly uncharitable towards myself, I blame laziness and a lack of discipline, but really, being an art god was never one of my priorities. Even today, I draw about as well as some eight-year olds. They would have to be really talented eight-year olds, sure, but still, I’m an adult and those are second graders.
In hindsight, what drove my unwillingness to call myself an artist in grade nine was this sentiment that I really wasn’t trying to express anything deep, for the most part, and the secondary sentiment of exploring really quickly but being uninterested in deep, methodical refinement of the basics. It struck me as a major difference between my behaviour and that of my friends. I was really just messing around, and not taking anything that seriously; but also, I wasn’t actually interested in taking things that seriously. The disaster art saga reflects this; I wanted the satisfaction of making paintings. Unfortunately, I feel as though there is some sort of stigma against making visual art for the sake of doing it. It felt like I was somehow transgressing by daring to intentionally make bad art.
IV.
Of all of the artistic disciplines, I think the visual arts place the most emphasis on technical skills. Sure, all disciplines value skill: I’m also a writer and a musician and I’ve spent significant amounts of time working to improve in those areas. But in my experience, most people do not assume they cannot be musicians or writers because they are not technically skilled writers or musicians yet; in fact, most people are totally happy to call themselves musicians or writers even if their technical skills are non-existent. I feel like there is much more of a culture in those art forms of allowing people to be amateurs with a casual hobby or passing interest, whereas in the visual arts it always seems like we’re in some way looking down on people who have no interest in striving for a professional level of quality.
I think part of my complicated relationship with art is that I have no interest in reaching a professional level of drawing skill, and I’m not all that interested in pursuing realism in drawing. But there’s this overall sense of art elitism that seems to suggest that if you want to call yourself “an artist”, you have to have “put in your hours” in terms of studying art fundamentals like anatomy and perspective and realistic drawing. It’s like you need to justify your hobby by showing off all of the hours you’ve spent gaining technical skill you might not actually need or care about. If you’re interested in abstraction, you’re only doing it because you’re incapable of “real art”. It’s like I need to prove that I didn’t choose to focus on investigating shapes and colour because I was incapable of drawing realistic humans.
Drawing skill is absurdly fetishized, and often even used as a proxy to judge someone’s level of “creativity”, which makes me sad because there is more to visual art than one’s ability to draw the planes of the face in perspective. It also feels like we assume it’s a fixed thing we’re born with; by middle school, people who don’t think they have drawing skills often check out of their art classes completely. But there is so much to explore with using different textures, mixing media, collaging, remixing other works, and straight up just playing around and trying things. I don’t know why as we get older and hit the preteen and teen years, the desire to explore visually gets replaced with this sort of public fear of exposing a lack of technical skill. Like, of course, skill matters, if you want to be a professional. But does everyone need to want to be?
My primary artistic discipline is creative writing, and I feel like it’s on the complete opposite of the spectrum when it comes to this. I find that young writers are primarily conditioned to talk about their ideas, and their characters, and overall just be excited about telling stories, so much so that there is often disproportionate value assigned to talking about ideas rather than talking about execution. As someone who wants to write at a professional level of quality, I strive to improve at the fundamentals, but it doesn’t seem like there is any sort of cultural push towards prioritizing improving writing craft over having fun. I don’t know if this is the correct approach either – I certainly think spending some time thinking about craft in any artistic discipline is good for you – but it does strike me as an overall much healthier approach than whatever the visual arts community is doing.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have to feel like we had to be “good” or “talented” at art to have any sort of business making it. Kids drawing anatomically incorrect animé aren’t hurting anyone.
Just saying.