Most days, I am SO grateful for what the internet has done for my life. Twelve years ago I was able to start taking a photo each day and it led to a career in photography. Eight years ago, I was able to start drawing and doodling every day and it has led to an unimaginably exciting path into publishing. It’s been possible to do that without formal training, while living in remote locations and raising babies. What a wonderful thing that never could have occurred without unrestricted internet access. These days I am so grateful for zooms with interesting art directors and editors, not to mention the mentoring sessions, peer group chats and philosophical conversations held online in parallel with long drawing shifts in my living room studio.
Some days though, I wonder what my art might look like today if I had spent a decade creating it totally in secret. I wonder what the influence of seeing imagery all the time has done to my sense of artistic identity. In my quiet moments I think about things like people-pleasing tendencies, the desire to be ‘relevant’ (or fear of not being hireable) and the hang-ups about seeming like I know how to draw…and if I’m deeply honest with myself, I know that some things have been suppressed a little.
Perhaps all of what I have just said is par for the course in the early days of a creative or just life in your twenties- your band’s music sounds a bit too much like your musical heroes', your clothing choices are more influenced by trends and what others say looks good. But then, one day, you just cross a threshold. Suddenly the desire to be uncompromisingly ‘you’ becomes noticeably louder. You start to think in terms of personal style rather than trends and any form of masking starts to feel like a pair of uncomfortable shoes you want to kick off so you can just make contact with the earth and feel the grass in between your toes finally.
As Brene Brown would say, the little voice of mid-life shows up that says you’re halfway to dead already and need to stop messing around.
Many reading this will relate to the fear that arises when we realise we’re on that threshold of what we’ve been doing to date and what we are aching to do next. We know that some things will have to fall away or even be forcibly thrown out. We know it can feel like casting away from a shoreline and bobbing around on the sea, unable to see land on the next horizon. For me, this has involved lining up hundreds of sketches, thanking them, and then tucking them away into archive boxes forever because they no longer fit my portfolio. It has also involved being willing to brave some darker subject matter and really just let those things be messy and let them breathe a little on the page or canvas until I see what dimension they might add to my existing work. A lot of the story ideas I think up have strong emotional themes, so it feels right to be willing to get artistically curious about things like sadness and even anger.
For this, I’ve found myself exploring a low-key monochrome that is quite far away from my usual colour-rich and luminous leanings. These are two such experiments into a darker textural way of working.
In exploring this new dimension though, I can still find luminaries who light the path ahead of me. For example, I love this work by the artist Isabelle Arsenault from ‘Jane, the Fox and Me’. I love everything she makes but there is something very cool about this combination of rich loose colour and monochrome panels. Hurrah for mentors who unknowingly mentor us purely by being brave enough to be themselves in public.
If you’re currently standing at a similar threshold in your art, your relationships or your life in general, I just want to encourage you. The reward for striking out with courage is the connection and fulfilment on the other side. Letting yourself be truly seen and known and letting your art get as strange or dark or emotional or zany or vivid as it needs to is the path to a whole myriad of things you might not even have considered; not just artistic satisfaction, but also finding ‘your people’, the ones who think like you and love every bit of your weird artistic brilliance.
I don’t say this as someone who has ‘arrived’ or nailed this at all, I’ve only just begun to get brave after a decade, but I say it as someone who wants to keep pushing towards glorious authentic and full life on all fronts. So maybe we can be brave and weird together?
Gill xo
I love these words: 'any form of masking starts to feel like a pair of uncomfortable shoes you want to kick off so you can just make contact with the earth and feel the grass in between your toes finally'. You are describing the mid-life transition to becoming more fully yourself so beautifully ❤
Beautifully articulated. Thank you for the encouragement! Sometimes, doubt seeps in when I’m on a path of following my curiosity with collage art or with my photography. It takes courage to create and share.