Charlie's Blog #50: The lost artist

The lost artist

Lost and neglected somewhere inside of me lurks the creative spirit of an artist. In my youth I was always drawing, and did pretty well in all the art classes I took. I developed what can only be called in the broadest sense, an abstract bent. I was most inspired by surrealism. In college I did a lot of drawings, for lack of a better term, with watercolor markers (richer colors than plain ol' regular markers), and had a few ideas I was exploring with that media. I probably should scan them and post them here sometime. Since I graduated over a decade ago, I have rarely done anything artistic at all. Quite possibly the only artistic thing I've done since then was to make these icons.

Now this isn't some tragic story of an artist who "never painted again" after some traumatic life experience... I just got too busy! I graduated, moved out to live life on my own, got involved with my then girlfriend/now wife, and started my career. It seemed I never had time. I did occasionally yearn to do something creative along those lines, but never found the time. Now that I'm a daddy and really have no time, I'm beginning to miss such creative expression even more.

What brought it up today and got me writing this is that I just read the December 2003 Smithsonian article on Marc Chagall. He seems to have had the kind of unbounded creativity I always strived for. I'd like to see more of, and find out more about his work. Thinking back now on the watercolor marker pictures I did in college, I think I was on the road to finding my "artistic voice". I don't know how close I was, but I think I was on the road.

Now, honestly, I could find time here and there to pursue my artwork, but if a general lack of time wasn't bad enough, I also lack a media that I like. I have actually never painted. I like the textures that I see in paintings, but it looks like it can be a messy undertaking that would probably require some part of my house to be set aside just for that. And paintings are usually pretty big. Usually measured in feet. Where do you put all your paintings after you run out of wall space?? The watercolor markers were good (on easy to store 8.5x11 paper), but what I really want is some kind of digital media that can be easily backed up on a CD or posted on the web, but with the freedom and ease of use of traditional media. Technologies like ray tracing still seem to be very challenged when trying to recreate natural forms, so I think I would probably need a graphic tablet digitizer to do what I really want to do. I probably really do need to find out what this Photoshop is all about too at some point... But it's really more about image manipulation than creation, right?

(sigh) What's a frustrated artist to do?





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