Am I really an artist?

I tried posting this the other day, but apparently it and the saved version for the Post Recover feature got lost in the last server crash over at blogspot. I didn't give it much thought until just now. I'll leave the reason why to the people that know the reason why.

For the longest time, anyone who has ever seen my drawings have always told me that I should go into art school. They loved my drawings and thought they were the best things they ever saw. It is because of this support over the years that made me want to seek out art schools. I felt like becoming an artist was my place in life.

Now that I am here, I'm being told that everything I do needs work. All around me, I see pieces of beautiful taught and craft, and yet mine are the ones that need the most work. What I do is either too cute, naive, too simple, not simple enough, kitsch, and sometimes even declared not falling into the realm of fine art. I stopped cartooning, mostly because of my own changes in priorities. I've fallen out of doing what people said I was so great at doing.

Why? Because suddenly people are saying that what I am doing isn't so great.

Meanwhile, there are people that have not seen the education that I have up until this point making more of an impact than I probably ever will. Because they are untainted? I was there, but I was also told that an education is better than none at all. Yet here I am looking at slides on a PowerPoint presentation of untrained artists whose works are in galleries all over the country. Like everyone else in the class, I can't help but ask the one question that must be going through your minds right now.

What am I doing here? Why have I spent three years of my life studying to be an artist when there are people twice as old as myself making a fortune off of paintings that look like a grade schooler did them? What was the point?

I probably am not even suppose to be an artist given what I want to do, what I want to create. And by that, I mean what I am really interested in and what ideas make me obsessive.

Go figure that the person that considers everything from video games to stills in an animated film a form of high art is the one that is now considering if he even belongs in art. Ironic given the openness and the willingness to ask "why can't this be considered gallery worthy? So what if it was originally created in a theme park with the intent of being entertainment? It can still be art, can't it?"

Naive questions coming from a naive person whose talents and creative energy have been over run by insecurities causing him to escape once again to the worlds of video games despite the loud voice telling him to pull away, to stop living this false life again, to go back to being stressed and worried and angry and not sure if there is enough time to finish the project before the due date. Because that is how you are suppose to live life. This isn't the way.

Well then, what way should I go now? I was told all my life that I should be an artist because of my cartoons. I don't want to go into animation because I don't like the assembly line process that is masquerading around as artistic creativity. I don't want to go into professional illustration because that would mean becoming a commercial commodity as a person, which I don't want to become. I rather create things that will eventually become a commercial produce against my will rather than willingly become a living, breathing, walking commercial product.

But apparently I'm not an artist. So where do I go? What do I do?

I want to gather everything I've created into a big pile in an empty parking lot and then set it on fire. I want to film the process of this act. I want to project it larger than life on the wall. I want to title it I am not an artist. Does that make me one in some ironic twist of fate?