I’ve been drifting for an incredibly long time now.

I lost my focus in the rush of feelings and healing that I’ve been going through. It’s a process that wipes you out.

I’ve been searching for a deeper meaning in my life, and felt like, to help people, I had to be doing something more. But yesterday, Jayjay Ferro left a comment that said:

“How you can help? Ha, you’re already doing it! Sharing your stories, creating beautiful art, and just being yourself.”

Duh, I thought. Of course. Here I am, again, trying to become someone different, to help others, to make them happy, to be liked. Seems like this is a pattern that won’t be going away any time soon.

But I don’t need to “be” anyone different or “do” anything different. I just need to be me, and like Jayjay said, share myself and my art. (Thanks Jayjay!)

So I’ve decided to get back to basics – the making of art, of things that I love.

My art is deeply personal. It always has been. It’s my way of expressing myself, my joys, my pains, my loves. Looking at my site, there are things that I need to change – my artist’s statement is completely inaccurate now, and my vision has deepened considerably since I wrote it.

I used to think that my art was about the outside world. It’s not. It’s about the world inside of me, projected onto the things I see that move me, or touch me somehow.

The drawing of life

With any luck, I’ll be starting life drawing classes next week, and I can’t describe to you how excited I am. We’ve had some trouble finding models, but I think that things are finally falling into place and I’m starting to plan paintings.

Going through sketchbooks from last year’s life drawing class is an exercise in getting my blood rushing. I look through my drawings and ideas pour forth. Images dance before my eyes and it’s a surreal experience – that feeling of beginning a new body of work, a new adventure, is an indescribable feeling. I get such a rush from it.

Some people jump off buildings for excitement. I draw naked people.

Things like line, shape, and form fill me with a kind of nail biting anticipation. The tones of the skin, opalescent, grayed, gentle, soft, like it’s been lined with mother of pearl. The vulnerability, fragility and delicacy of exposed skin is almost too much. Drawing, I get lost in another world.

No wonder they compare making art to sex.

This drawing will probably become a painting. The line of her calf, coming down and meeting the line of her heel is so utterly perfect that I can’t stop staring at it. Her shoulder, pulled back, her arm relaxed across the chair is so vulnerable, so beautiful that I get choked up.

It reminds me of how much I physically need to make art. Art isn’t just a hobby for me. It’s not something that I “like”. It’s an intense passion,  an ecstatic love affair, with as much turmoil, frustration, exasperation and need as a forbidden liaison. Sometimes art and I are inseparable and sometimes, like now, we aren’t talking. But for me, art is non-negotiable. It always has been and always will be a part of my life.

I can’t help myself. When we’re apart, I’m miserable. But when we get back together, it’s beautiful.

I couldn’t be doing anything else with my life. This is who I am, this is what I love. For the first time in a long time, I’m going to allow myself that luxury.