Why "I Suck" (is) Great

My sister's first boyfriend had this thing I found out about some years ago when they were still dating. Apparently, my sister would often say negative things about her body while shopping for clothes, most of which involving how she hated being a size zero and being forced to pay $10 more than people who are a size 1. He didn't really like that, so he made a game with her: for every negative thing she said, she had to come up with four positive things right then and there on the spot that counter it.

I was challenged to do the same thing. I don't know what I said about the project I'm working on that was negative about it, short of an outside conversation where I pointed out I've never had a good critique as far as communicating a concept, but I clearly said something negative. I have to now come up with five positive things about the project. No false positives; no beating around the bush and turning a negative into a positive. Oh, and I have to make it public on my blog.

So off the top of my head, much like my sister would have to do, here are five positive things about Drawings Produced In A Vain Attempt To Escape The Fact That I Suck.

First off, I'm happy with the fact that this piece has completely thrown out craft and presentation from the required elements of formal art. I was always told I need to work on those two parts in nearly all my school work, but in doing so, I felt like I was over-tooling a drawing or complicating something that looked fine as simple as it was. Not caring or worrying about craft or how to present this formally makes the process very liberating. I don't have to worry about cleaning up my images or making sure my hands are clean from ink when I move them. In fact, the last batch I finished was in a black pen that kept getting on to my hand whenever I moved it over an area! Now that's showing the artist's hand in a very literal context. If this was any other piece, I would have tried to clean it up and not have that happen. But the drawing looks fine even with the messy aesthetics, and I'm happy with that.

I also like the fact that the images I'm producing have no common thread in their content, aesthetics, or subject matter. There may be patterns, sure, but what I've produced so far have very little to do with the drawings I've produced before or after any given drawing. In fact, to drive this point home, I've been randomly shoving my drawings into the box in no order whatsoever. It's another very liberating feeling knowing that I don't have to be consciously editing myself as I'm producing a drawing just to make sure it fits whatever body of work I'm going for. If I want to draw a realistic, muscular elf one page and then turn around and draw a Disney dog on the next, I can do that without having to worry about people wondering what the fuck those to have to do with each other to begin with. Right now, half of what I produced has text and a comic dialogue while the other half doesn't even take up a quarter of the page. I'm not worried about what kind of sign or signifier I'm creating in the process nor do I care to find out if there is one in the images or not. Each individual image has something unique to itself and doesn't have to relate to the others in the box. If someone tries to find that common thread, they will only find two things: they are done in a cartoon genre of drawing and they are all housed in a printer paper box. Other than that? They all look like just handed pens and paper to random people and said "Draw something."

The process of the piece is pretty much second nature for me. I grab a sheet of paper, draw on it, when I like (or don't like) what I draw, I put the paper back into the box. My sketchbooks are covered with this same kind of process, though not so much in the last year due to classes. Hell, my mom has a file of my drawings that were done in the same way somewhere in that big file cabinet of hers! It's not as difficult as trying to do a formal drawing, with the cleaning and perfect rendering of shade, and it isn't as time consuming as a sculptural process, with the refinement of the surface texture and figuring out weight distribution. All I need to do is pick up a piece of paper and draw on it until my heart's content.

The project itself is relatively cheap. A stack of printer paper, even if you buy it in bulk, rarely breaks $50. I'm also using ball-point pens, which are sold by the masses at Wal -Mart for as little as $1 for three!! I've never priced any of my pieces before, but if I wanted to sell this project as a whole and not just the images (which is an idea I've been throwing around every time I produce something I think would make a great shirt), I can easily make a profit margin of 10x what it costs in material. And after spending $300+ on art related stuff, I need a project like this: cheap to produce with a high profit turn-around.

So let's see. This project is great because I don't have to worry about craft, I'm not forcing myself to edit while I'm producing the images or "make them fit" an idea, the process is second nature to how I already work with my personal projects outside of school, and it's cheap enough to where I could make a decent profit margin off of it in one way or another. That's four!

This last one is definitely a positive. There's no doubt about that. Just keep in mind that this kind of thing doesn't happen to me very often, and when it does, I tend to react in a way that isn't normal.

I like the fact that this project started out as a release and a proposal to what I thought was an empty void not a lot of people were interested in reading, and from that generated a response I have never seen let alone be the focal point of. My last few entries have the most number of comments on this blog to date. If I were to include the stuff that has filtered over into reality as a result of my blogging, it's definitely something that is both encouraging and strange. The good kind of strange, you know? The kind of strange that results in fetish culture where people outside of yourself or your group end up looking at you with wary eyes, and yet you don't give a damn what you think because that attraction to the strange just makes their opinion invalid. It's not as harsh as that, but that's the best way I can put the feeling that I've been having as a result from all the feedback. I've never really had this kind of support. It's always been the "That's a great idea, but..." scenario. This is the first time that I can remember where people--total strangers, sometimes--are saying "That's a great idea! Do it!" without adding any kind of cautionary add-ons.

And to be honest, I would rather have what is happening now with this project rather than the whole "present the idea at the beginning to a group of your peers and have them critique you during the process" scenario that I've been having since I started college. While I see the benefits of that process, I usually end up feeling like the end product isn't something I can own up to, something that I can say is all me. It mostly has to do with the process of critiquing half-way through the process and having suggestions being thrown at you by people who may or may not know what you are trying to do even if it is a very simple idea. Don't misunderstand me; there have been some very good suggestions that I have taken from people who I respect. But if I get even a hint that they don't know where I'm going or what I'm doing based on what they suggest I should do with a half-finished product, then I feel they are better off doing the piece for me because it won't end up being something that I created. I'm not being negative so much as I am being critical about this process.

That said, I like the fact that the project cannot be critiqued mid-way. It's just impossible. Only a few people have seen just a few pieces from the set, but they looked at them as individual drawings and not as elements in one piece. And the people that are generating feedback that are following this project here on my blog probably won't see it at all until I figure out how I want to display these images. And I like that. Nobody can interrupt the process and tell me where to go and what to do with them. Nobody can suggest that I do this or that hinting that they have no idea what the piece is about. I can finally create something that I can look back on and know that everything in that box, every image I drew, is 100% me.

I get that feeling every time I watch my old Blazing Rhythms fireworks show on YouTube . I've only had that feeling a few times while I've been in college, and it was always in the classes where the teacher was open to what I wanted to do and never tried to suggest something that would change the work into a direction I didn't want it to go.

Telling me to go bigger is one thing. Telling me to turn left when I want to turn right is another. Telling me to turn right in a bigger car is something I'll probably take into consideration; if I like the idea and where I'm going, I'll do it.