Trust Your Art

I am quite tickled by how well this post follows from the one which preceded it. That doesn't usually happen. But one of the things I am thinking about lately is how difficult it is, for me at least, to trust myself as an artist.

An artist? *shudder* I don't even like to use the word. How pretentious! How could I possibly be a for real life artist. I'm not actually good at anything. Look at Caravaggio. Look at Martha Graham. Look at Billy Collins. Now those people are artists. They are talented.

But what can I do? I love to paint. I live to dance. And I love to write as well. This problem came crashing down on me recently when A. and I decided to spend an afternoon painting out in the sun in our backyard. It was lovely. She chose watercolors and I chose tempera (not my medium of choice, but all we had in the house)and a huge sheet of paper. I wanted to experiment with trying to stay within one color family. I used mostly greens and blues with a little indigo and one shot of strategically placed red. I painted for maybe an hour. It was great fun. I enjoyed mixing the colors. I used ferns and leaves to make prints. But at the end of the day, I still looked at my painting and said to myself, "Wow, that really sucks." It is so hard, at the end of the day, not to judge success by the outcome and not to judge the outcome by comparing it to the greatest masters of art that ever lived. Why do I do this to myself? It is critical for me to remeber that the point of my painting is not to be Caravaggio or Picasso or Turner. The point of my painting is to have painted. To express myself. To do something that I love.

And I have to believe this even more than most because this is a message I want to bring to other people, as I was talking about in my last post. I want other people to be empowered to express themselves through art without fear of judgement or threat of comparison, even if they're doing it to themselves. How can I preach what I'm not practicing?

Now, it is important for me to note here that I in no way mean to say that I am equal to Caravaggio. I am not going to say that I am a good painter, no matter how much I enjoy it. I still believe that there are standards, no matter how fluid their definitions may be and that something can show technical skill or the lack of it. All I am saying is that lack of skill shouldn't keep you from doing something for your own pleasure and taking some pride in what you do.

The reason that I am thinking of this today is that I have had the delight of getting to go to my new dance space, the parish hall at Westminster Presbyterian. It is the most wonderful thing that has happened to me in the past two months. Maybe longer. It is huge and has great accoustics and feels very private. Getting to go there is like a trip to Disneyworld for me every time because that is where I really get to dance.

Now, most of my friends, and even some of the people who barely know me, understand that I like to dance. But what I don't think anyone really understands is the degree to which I love dancing. I think about dancing or actually do a little dancing probably every hour of the day. I make up choreographies in my head when I'm day dreaming. I listen to all music in terms of its dance potential. Dancing is all that I want to talk about with other people. You people have no idea how much babble I spare you from. And right now is an incredibly exciting time for me in my dance journey. I've just recently discovered amazing new music. And then there's floorwork, something that I've been wanting for weeks to explore, which is finally starting to click for me. By this I mean, changing levels, going from standing straight to crouching to kneeling to lying on the floor, all kinds of stuff that's really hard to transition into and out of smoothly. And thanks to an incredibly low-brow, incredibly wonderful dance show on TV, I've recently discovered the entirely new-to-me genres of lyrical hip hop and contemporary dance. I don't even have words to tell you how exciting that is. It's like...not like learning a new language, but like learning for the first time that there are words for your emotions, which you'd never been able to express to anyone before. Or like learning how, instead of just saying "I'm sad," you could say, "I'm mourning" or "I'm heartbroken" and it would mean two different things. It's like discovering that besides just being beautiful and fun, I can speak with dance, I can tell stories, I can express and process emotions, even if I'm all by myself. Sigh. It's unspeakably wonderful.

But today, after being in my happy place doing one of the things I love most in the world, I left feeling kind of blue. Why? Because my popping isn't crisp enough, my lines are in shambles, my balance is a joke, and if I don't have a partner to do the foxtrot with, am I really doing a foxtrot? Now I should mention at this juncture that I have been dancing for approximately thirteen years but I have taken approximately three classes in my life, two when I was six and one when I was sixteen. All I've ever really done is start dancing to a Steven Curtis Chapman song in my living room one day when I was 11 and I haven't stopped since (which is actually its own great story, but one for another day). But the upshot of this is that I have no idea where I fall on the spectrum of technical "goodness." And it doesn't help that I've never seen myself dance, primarily due to the fact that I've never had a space with mirrors. So I don't even know if my lines are a mess because I've never seen my lines. Part of me knows that this is due largely to the fact that I really have never sought such spaces because I have certain illusions about myself as a dancer that I don't want to shatter. But at the same time, I think I can recognize that I dance much better than I paint. It's tricky here because I'm just good enough to know that I could be better, whereas with painting I doubt how much better I could possibly get.

So what does it all mean? Do I suck, or am I an undiscovered genius? But at the end of the day, maybe those are the wrong questions to ask. Must everything be polarized into stardom or shame? Here is what I'm going to do. I'm going to recognize that I fall somewhere in the middle and keep dancing and keep loving dance. And recognize that I fall somewhere towards the bottom and still keep painting. And, who knows? maybe I'll even recognize that I've hit a wall in my own ability to coach myself as a dancer and go out and get some of that technical skill from somebody who really knows what they're doing. Not that I'll ever be Martha Graham or anything...

S.