Along the way, I’ve lost the ability to be brave. These sentiments reverberate throughout my work and in my choices in life. I’ve succumbed to diluted projections of the world, of others, and what I imagine they would want, instead of yielding to the wave of what it needs to be.
I tell myself often: Don’t be afraid. You have nothing to lose. And if it leaves you, it fulfills the reason it was there. Art is there to express. You don’t have to fear. Use beauty and pain, take what you feel, how you want to interact with the strangeness of the world, and churn it into art.
This is what I’ve been pondering: Why do I feel that fear within my practice?
After reflection, I’ve come to a bit of a consensus within myself:
I haven’t been making my art.
A lot of what I’ve been trying to make the past few years has felt that way. I had forgotten what good art feels like in the body, to the creator. It can indeed be a turbulent thing, it has the capacity to be joyful and filled with dread. But the artist keeps going because they sense it strongly within their body that this is good.
For several years now, how I create has taken a very different curve. It is not my own work anymore, and I feel that it is because of the influx of images that bombard us daily. As artists, we end up loving too many things, and feeling we want to use everything we see as inspiration. Despite the many advantages of Instagram and its competing visual apps, we are choking on art. A lot of it is all art we love of course, but with the mental tidal wave, we do not seem to have time to wade into singular images.
The feelings of art making recently: It’s a perpetual intimidation. Being scared of what others will think, if I’m pushing too much, if I’m showing too much, revealing too much, and exploring topics that may be taboo.
This angst comes as a buildup of several things. A few years ago I posted a very mild semi-nude photo of myself. My mother went out of the way to tell me how pornographic it was.
As I had just recently undergone major surgery, my mental state at the moment was not in a place where I could take it in stride.
It sent me into a flurry of pain, frustration, and doubt. It knocked me into a corner of creation where I felt I should only explore the beautiful things on a tame level, things that wouldn’t disrupt, one where people who were more conservative could look at and say, “Oh, what a nice message.”
But now here I am, fresh out of a breakup, still reeling from things that were said at the end, but simultaneously still trying to keep my head up and not cause too many waves. Of course, I want to do the right thing and remain demure and keep the vocalization about the experience at a minimum, but the feelings still remain within my body. They still speak to me. So I know eventually they will become an image.
Now I am trying to understand what it is I want in my art. I want to lose my inhibitions and find complete freedom in my work.
It’s a lot. And I realize I haven’t found a lot of freedom in my work for a long time. I’m trying, I’m trying. But the walls are bolted into the ground. Yet I can feel my body plead with me, begging for them to come down.
Another aspect of it all is running furiously to what you love. This is hard to know the feeling if you have never felt it before. I have, and I remember it. It left a taste in my mouth and now I’m spoiled by it. Nothing tastes as sweet anymore.
One thing that helped me realize my lack of passion in my own work is bachata. Something so seemingly unrelated, so distant from photography, but I absolutely adore it. Despite being new and hopping on the wagon so late. I knew when I tried my hand at the dance several years ago that I adored it, but I didn’t follow my nose. I was timid, and I allowed myself to slip into patterns that brought me little to no joy. I allowed myself to fall into the same rut as the people around me, and I didn’t establish rules for myself, rules that I so desperately needed to follow.
But now I know. Now I know. I can feel it. It echoes inside. It blazes. It’s there.
The permission to express pain. The love to express pain. To unearth it. To scream at it. And then finally allow it to burst into a mist. From there it may not return again. You just keep screaming at it until it’s gone. Scream scream scream.
Sometimes you need to put the pain in your body in a different vessel, and oftentimes it is art.
We must be brave enough to express ourselves, and we can come closer to the art we need to make and close the gap between who we want to be, and who we are. Through that, we can become closer to who we are meant to be. At this moment I’m still looking. It’s hard to have a body, with all these chemicals raging within us. But there are some things that can calm those waters. I like to think that art is one of them. I just need to play the trust game a bit better and fall backwards into it.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to read the blog. I love writing here, and I’m always trying to find more time to post and examine my own art and philosophy. I would love to redirect you to Patreon at the link below for anyone interested in seeing more behind the scenes and supporting the writing and art. I’m always trying to find ways to maximize my own work and to share it in ways that are honest and true to my practice. Would love to see you on there.
