December 13: Vent

I don't know if it's just me, or if this is something that every artist goes through, but every now and then I can do nothing but loathe the stuff I draw. I look at my scribbles on the page or the screen in front of me, and then I look at what other artists out there are doing. And the same way a 13-year-old girl looks at the pages of a fashion magazine, I cannot help but compare myself to what I see in front of me. This is usually followed by frustration, sometimes by anger. I get mad that my shit doesn't look like their shit, and that they're admired and respected and I'm not. I get mad that I don't know how to do the things with their work that they do. I get mad that I don't have a gallery opening in Tokyo or an art book coming out at an exclusive party in Los Angeles. Upset, hopeless, frustrated, angry. That's how the cycle goes.

I'm glad, though, that this doesn't happen to me all the time. There are times when I see myself as only a step or two away from an epiphany of some sort, at which time I'll hit that proverbial ten-thousandth bad drawing necessary before all the really good drawings. I sit back and admire the thing I created out of nothing and feel good that my efforts have produced good fruit. Unfortunately it's not that time for me right now. So what I'm doing is writing about this, on a blog that I'm almost positive nobody reads, trying to make myself feel better about my lack of ability, about my lack of discipline, about by bank account, the list goes on.

[It's funny, and this just occurred to me, that when I'm mad I'm mad that I'm not at the top of my career, but when I'm feeling good I'm happy that I almost have a career; not happy that I'm almost famous but that I might almost have any career at all, even if it's just as an up-and-coming artist. That seems a little weird to me for some reason.]

I often wonder if all this hard work will ever get me anywhere professionally. I hope it does, and that's what I keep telling myself, that I'm doing it because I love to do it and that I wouldn't be happy with my life (at all) if I weren't drawing. And it'd be really nice to one day be drawing professionally... ah, who am I kidding, I'd piss myself ten times over to know that I'd someday be drawing for a living.

So I'm posting this just to vent a little bit and get this out of my system. Thankfully it's helping. More sketches coming soon. Until then....