My relationship with arting (someone really needs to come up with some kind of actual verb for those of us who mess around with mixed media) is much more violent than my relationship with writing.
The most aggressive thing I do when I write is roll around on the floor whining; maybe snarl a bit in a kind of self-mocking way. When my art isn’t cooperating, though, cue the screaming and the looking for something to stab.
(I COULD REALLY USE SOMETHING TO STAB RIGHT NOW. JFC, HOW can it be THIS HARD to block in a stupid fucking pose?!)
I’m curious why this is. Maybe it’s because words are more tame for me? Sometimes they struggle a bit, but I never have any real sense that they have the upper hand. It’s only a matter of time before I manage to herd them into position. Art, for me, is more wild. Things do not happen the way I want them to happen just because I know that’s how they should happen. This pose, for example, has climbed into a tree out of my reach, and is sitting there laughing at me from the higher branches while I flail uselessly at it.
Or maybe it’s the degrees of removal. A portion of my approach to writing is that I think of it as illustrating images through words. But this will always be an inexact science, and I understand that. Even if I could lay down every word perfectly, it still wouldn’t quite pick up the idea in my head and drop it fully-formed into yours, because the language map in my mind isn’t quite the same as the language map in yours.
(For this reason, there comes a point when you might as well give up laboring over the ‘perfect sentence.’ The cold fact is, you’re wasting your time because nobody but you will think it’s perfect.)
When it comes to art, however, I have an image in my head, and an image on paper, and in a perfect world, the image on the paper (or the computer screen) would match the one in my head when I was finished.
IT SOUNDS SO EASY, DOESN’T IT. HAHAHAHAHA. Here’s the reality: ”Arrrrrrrrrrgh I JUST WANT HIS GODDAMN SHOULDER TO TWIST THIS WAY, it’s a freaking LINE, HOW can it feel like moving granite just to make it go where I want it to?!”
This has been a glimpse into my arting process. Because I know you wanted to know.