Why Am I An Artist? 1

Well, my first response is to dismiss this question as five words of fatuous nonsense.  Or perhaps a rhetorical "Why not be an artist?"  So, someone today innocently asked me what made me choose to be an artist?  There are so many things wrong with the question that I wouldn't even know where to begin.  But it is still a valid question.  I know that somehow along the way I was perpetually deciding to do art, except for one thing.  I never really thought about it.  I still don't really and if anyone asks me if I'm an artist I tend to pause before answering, usually yes, never no, but really I don't think about it so much. 

I don't think much about breathing either, unless I am for some reason short of breath; neither do I think about eating unless I'm hungry.  Art, or the desire, need and drive to create is almost an essential innate human appetite.  The need to create is as essentially human as our appetites for food, our need to breath and the urge to procreate.

I do remember my first drawing, or I think it was my first.  I must have been four years old.  I wanted to draw a bird, a flying bird.  I had already seen a few and they were so wonderful that I wanted to repeat the experience.  I think that by creating the image I felt instinctively that I would be deeply participating in the magic that is a beautiful creature flying.

I found the result very funny looking, more like a flying cartoon duck.  I felt gravely disappointed in my effort and really hoped that one day I could do better.  Mom stuck it up on the fridge, to my shame and embarrassment because I knew it wasn't good.  To this day I haven't the foggiest as to what got me to start drawing.  I think that Mom must have simply put some blank paper and crayons in front of me on a rainy afternoon in order to keep me quiet and out of her hair and suggested that I start drawing.  It seemed like such a small simple thing to do.  I was hooked.

I continued to draw and colour throughout my childhood.  By grade four I was becoming rather good at drawing people and horses.  In grade five I did some admirable Christmas motifs-stars, candles, bells and Santa Claus.  I tried my hand at drawing a deciduous forest in winter, no snow on the ground.  It was all bare trees and naked branches on an estate.  There was a beautiful red cardinal perched on a foreground branch.  In the background I drew a white southern colonial mansion.  To this day I don't have a clue where I picked up that image but I also recall that it was very well done with pencil crayons. 

In grade six I was drawing the great cats, especially leopards (to this day I love leopards or panthers) with the help of a drawing guide book I had bought at the local Hudson's Bay in Richmond.  In grade seven and eight I became interested in the female nude and showed such promise that my brother borrowed some of my drawings to show to his grade eleven art teacher who apparently was more than a little impressed.  He never told me what else he did with the drawings of nude women and to this day I'm still glad that I will never know.

I did well in art class in high school but suffered under less than competent teachers.  My complete absorption in charismatic Christianity also did a lot to sideline for me other interests.  I still could never stay away long from a sketch book and in my early twenties was carrying one with me everywhere, sketching trees, faces from out of my mind (sometimes meeting the real-life bearers of these faces sometime later in the future!) and occasionally strangers completely unaware (or apparently unaware) that they were being immortalized.  I stayed away from colour, mostly out of fear.

When I was twenty-six or so I revived my interest in batik, a craft that I did fairly well in in Grade Twelve art class.  I ended up choosing exotic birds as my theme and ended up doing very well.  Then I started playing with pencil crayons and felt markers, mostly doing therapeutic abstract drawings, which became a very effective key for interpreting my inner life.

My fascination with tropical birds was gradually evolving into an obsession and in my late twenties and early thirties I was borrowing from the public library and buying beautifully illustrated books of birds of the world.  Then I began to experiment.  I stretched some cotton fabric on a wall and using felt markers produced a composition of surprisingly beautiful renderings of some of these birds:   



and too many others to show here.  I will conclude this idea on my next post.