Returning to Art After Twenty Years
It’s been nearly twenty years since I made any original art.
As a kid, I loved to draw. One of my favorite childhood pictures was me at seven years old at a park with a drawing pad and marker. I used to love Disney animated movies and would draw all my favorite characters — Ariel, the rebellious teenage mermaid; Nala, the lioness who left home for a chance to save her family; Clopin, the flamboyant (and sexy) jester/narrator from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I had dreams of someday becoming an animator for Disney.
During high school, my interests shifted toward writing, partly because I had discovered a love of wordplay and storytelling, and partly because my English classes fit better with the academic track I was on. The art classes always seemed to conflict with my honors classes, and, as a Chinese kid expected to get straight A’s, the honors classes were non-negotiable.
I took one more drawing class in college, for old time’s sake. I remember drawing a door under a lamp, and the teacher had an old woman with wild hair come in to model nude for us. But my interest waned by the end of the class because I couldn’t see what this had to do with my life anymore. That was the last time I drew anything.
In the mean time, I tried a lot of careers that were not art and not writing. Worked as an logistics assistant for an infomercial company — bored to tears. Moved to Seattle and thought about starting a metaphysical bookstore — remembered I hated retail. Learned energy healing and tried to start a Reiki practice — couldn’t market myself. Dabbled in trading stocks — boring and terrifying. From there, I realized I liked organizing money more than the risky business of investing it, so I went back to school and became an accountant.
Even though accounting was the polar opposite of my earlier aspirations, I was so relieved to do something normal for a change. Art and writing were mistakes I’d left behind a long time ago.
Art tiptoed its way back into my life around the time I realized I just couldn’t work for other people any more. I was a senior accountant for a manufacturing company with generous pay and fun coworkers, but I was deeply unhappy. I had a manager for whom a “hands-off” management style meant not knowing how his accounting system worked when there were only three of us in the department, but that was only part of the story. Another person probably would’ve endured it for a few years, if only as a stepping stone to some place better. But the more I saw where that stepping stone would lead, the more my heart sank.
I hated to admit it, but learning accounting made me happier than actually being an accountant. The former taught me how businesses worked, a whole side of society that I vaguely understood. The latter at best involved cleaning up other people’s messes and filling out tedious paperwork. At worst, I was losing sleep at night worrying the company wouldn’t be able to make payroll. I discovered that my favorite parts of the work were people-oriented, and I often felt lost crunching numbers by myself in the background.
Should I change directions once again? My newly-minted CPA license took two years of constant study and literally no social life to achieve. It would be so much effort and time down the drain — but in my mind, this unhappiness was worse. I played around with different business ideas, but eventually realized I needed to write again. I decided to start my own accounting practice so I could control my schedule and have spare time for writing.
In the midst of this, my cousin took the family to one of those paint-your-own ceramics stores. She thought I would like it because I used to be artistic. I thought it was strange that she still saw me that way, but whatever.
I was supposed to paint this plate, but being a perfectionist, I had a hard time deciding what to put on it. I walked around the store looking at other people’s work. Still couldn’t decide. Finally, I got sick of my indecision and started painting circles and dots on my plate, then drew swirls around the circles so they kind of looked like galaxies. Somehow that was really satisfying.
That experience sparked an impulse I didn’t know was there. I bought a book on acrylic painting and followed the tutorials. I loved the little 6” x 6” paintings I could make in a couple of hours, especially the ones depicting the ocean and water. In the back of my mind, though, I often thought I should be working on my writing instead of playing with things that “didn’t go anywhere.” After a while, and I stopped painting when I got busy building my accounting practice.
I ran my practice for a year and a half and found I was much, much, happier than working for someone else. Once I found a groove with my business, I started to spend more time writing, mostly about things I’ve experienced and the insights I’ve gained from them.
Along my writing journey, I kept getting the urge to illustrate my blog posts, but I ignored it because I was still a total beginner at painting. Besides, it would take too much time compared to finding a royalty-free photo. But my writing tended to be about abstract emotional processes, and I couldn’t always find photos that fit. So I finally gave in to the urge and made a watercolor painting for one of my essays on anxiety:
I almost threw out this painting. My watercolor skills weren’t that great, having really only followed tutorials and never painted anything original. I drew this brain-that-looks-like-a-knot based on a couple of references, started coloring it, hated how it was coming out, deliberately messed it up with splashes of color. When it dried, I traced the knot in ink and realized it kind of looked good. So I painted more of the strips and this was the result.
Once I realized I could do more than follow tutorials, I was hooked.
The first thing that drawing for the first time after twenty years taught me: art is sometimes unexpected. In the accounting world, I had gotten used to creating order out of chaos, since my work was about organizing business process in order to produce accurate financial reports. The unexpected can derail you from that order and is usually a threat to be managed, planned for, and reduced as much as possible.
When making art, the goal is not always about matching what you envisioned in your head. Sometimes your skills aren’t there, and you have to try a different approach. Sometimes you change your mind as you go along. Sometimes you screw up, and those screw-ups can lead you in a different direction if you keep your mind open. Sometimes your screw-ups give the piece more character. And of course sometimes you throw it away and start over. Art allows more room for the unexpected.
Making art, especially when I do it for fun, taught me to follow my intuition and impulses in ways that I don’t always dare. Other aspects of my life, such as writing and running my business, are subject to career expectations or monetary concerns that make me feel less free to experiment. With art, I could try new ideas, make a mess, and try again differently. There’s a sense of freedom not always allowed in other parts of my life.
I once thought that only “fine art” was art, because that’s what was taught in art classes. The classes progressed from still life to nude figure drawing, and if I weren’t interested in realism, then maybe art wasn’t for me. Twenty years ago, that might have been true. We weren’t as used to social media back then, and it wasn’t as easy to snap a picture with your phone and upload for all your friends to see. Besides, why would I share my amateur art, anyway? But social media taught me otherwise. Now we are used to sharing more of our lives with one another, and showing everybody your artwork doesn’t seem so silly as it once did (of course, it may have just been me). Now I know that art doesn’t have to be realistic to be “good,” that it can be made and shared at any skill level and for all sorts of reasons besides trying to be a professional artist.
Art has new meaning for me now. Having spent years living in the analytical mind, life has more dimensions and feeling. I no longer think loving art was a mistake.
I finally feel whole.
