In the time of chimpanzees...

Okay… I need to get something off my chest, and as many of you are artists I hope you might be able to make sense of what I’m about to tell you and give me a bit hope that it will be different someday. Usually I try to keep personal things out of the blog, but I am really kinda at a loss here…

See, up until I was 14 I never really thought about the fundamentals of art. I just drew stuff. Mostly I took an existing artstyle, say for a show or a movie and tried to replicate it. So most of the things I drew were fanart. It just made me happy and it was enough for me.
Then I discovered conceptart.org. And suddenly, things began to change. I read all those amazing comments and snippets of wisdom from artists that I admired and how they always repeated that hard work and practice make the difference, and I thought: Hell yeah, I want to get there too! And that’s when I first took art really seriously. I began to practice, bought books about art, anatomy, looked up online tutorials. When I was 18 I really felt like I achieved something, like this was the turning point for me to finally make the big leap and become leave this phase behind were you think your art is good but lacks that special something, like you know you have talent and you know what you want to draw, but your art is just not quite on par with that, you know what I mean?

And then the depression hit in summer 2010. I didn’t do any art for two months, and after that I just never could really get into it. It always felt like a struggle, and I hated everything I drew. I tried to force myself into practicing daily around the months between 2010/2011, I told myself if I just get it back into my daily routine, it will feel natural again, but it just made it worse, and I stopped drawing alltogether, except for occasional fanart and weird school-scribbles. Oh yeah, and for school, of course. At that time I was already really struggling with depression, without knowing it though. It only really hit me I needed help after I broke down in tears at my professional practice for NO reason at all and couldn’t stop crying. I… haven’t really told that anybody aside from my family and closest friends, so… it’s a bit hard for me to admit that… I really was a broken person during the summer 2011. I cried because of the littlest things, I hated myself, I actually had suicidal thoughts, everyday was a huge struggle…sometimes I didn’t even get out of bed at all or lied on the couch all day… it wasn’t pretty.
And art was out of the question. I didn’t do anything back then.
I only slowly began to ease my way into art again around October 2011, after I got myself help, a (temporary) therapist, and medication. But I was still a shadow of my former self. I wasn’t a real person anymore. I just floated through my daily life, like a robot, saying what was expected of me, reacting as people thought I should, but not feeling anything. I compared myself to others, diminishing myself, hating myself for who I was. I isolated myself, crying into my phone to my mother on a regular basis in the schoolyard because I just was so helpless and felt like I wasn’t even really existing anymore. Art was more of a way to pass time, to occupy myself so I wouldn’t burst out in tears in class. I once managed to fill seven pages of my sketchbook on one day because otherwise I would have snapped.
And then I made a very big decision I have not regretted ever since. I temporarily quit school, because it was a source of lot of negative emotions and hatred for me and I knew that spending my whole week in this place, I would go mad at the end of the year.

So now I’m currently at home, and I will not attend school until the next schoolyear starts again. I have to be able to find myself as a person again, because I lost total sight of it. I didn’t even know who I was anymore, and how can you lead a healthy, normal life if you don’t even recognize yourself in the mirror? When you feel like you are just a  bad caricature of a bad caricature of your real self? I only had 1 and a half year to go until my graduation, but I figured that graduation wasn’t worth it if I had to be hospitalized immediately afterwards.
So right now I’m in therapy, medication and on a way to finally rediscover myself again. I’m finally feeling relatively good about myself for the first time in 3 years. And I really start to feel better! I’ve read lots of good books already, have been crafty, I even got my ears pierced! (And as I have a HUGE ENORMOUS phobia of needles, that was a great achievement for me!) I’m starting to accept my looks, which is the hugest achievement I’ve ever got, but that’s a whole different story. I have never ever had so many wonderful ideas for my project. - I’m doing sports again and soon I’ll start a Krav Maga - course. - So I’m feeling pretty good right now.

Oookay, so you might ask yourself: Why the heck does she tell us her whole lifestory when she first said it was something about art? Get back on tracks, girl!
There’s a reason I’m telling you this. Because you might have noticed I’ve had a very rocky relationship to art in the past years and it’s still like art and me are like two people whose friends always hang out but who never really talked to each other on their own, and now we are sitting there, alone, while everybody else is doing something else. And neither of us knows how to strike up a conversation. It’s pretty awkward.

I feel like I should know what to do when I put down the pencil, because I’ve done it so many times, and practiced so hard over the years, but it just doesn’t happen anymore. And I’m not really feeling like I should force myself to practice and practice and practice anatomy, perspective and all that jazz, but feel guilty and fake if I don’t do it. And whenever I mess up a piece of art I always feel reminded that the foundations are important and that I should relearn them. But on the other hand I fear that I’ll just alienate myself from art if I force myself into doing so much studying again.
And I never really know HOW to draw things. Should I just be loose, should I construct things, should I be painterly or graphic? Should I be cartoony or realistic? Because no matter how I do it, I still kinda stumble and stagger through the whole process of an artwork, awkwardly fidgeting around and never feeling sure of what I do.
I see so many amazing artists, both realistic and abstract, both stylized and naturalistic, traditional and digital, and I always feel like: Oh man, I really would love to draw like that, and I should try out something similar myself! But the problem with that is that I feel like I’m being pulled in all different directions and everything’s shoving and pushing and making me stumbling around, and at the end I just fall on the ground, dizzy and without a sense of direction, all alone while all those nifty styles and artists pass by.

I’m really kinda at a loss here. I don’t know how to connect to art again so I can feel confident and good about what I draw. Should I start with the basics again? Should I just ignore all the technical stuff and draw whatever blurbs out of my weird little brain? Should I just sketch whatever I see? Should I just draw realistically and ditch stylisation completely? I feel like I don’t have an identity as a person and as an artist, like I’m still disconnected from myself. And it’s hard to talk to anybody who ISN’T an artist about that, because no matter how well meaning and supportive they are, they do not fully understand and cannot really give good advice.

Ach, I don’t know… maybe it already helped to write about it, maybe it will just come with time and I shouldn’t stress it. But art means a lot to me. It is my life. It has been the reason why I kept going through my whole teenager-years. It just feels pretty bad… like you lost a very good friend over the years because you just drifted apart and went your own seperate ways… but you don’t want to loose them because they still mean so much to you and you feel empty without them.
I’m rambling again, I’ll stop here. But I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this. It would mean a lot to me. <3