Kick, Push, Coast
Form is everything.
I’ve recently started skateboarding, and I enjoy spending time with my skateboard. I think it’s swell. My skateboard doesn’t give a damn who I am. If my skateboard could give a damn about anything, it would be form. My skateboard has reached perfection, or something like it, because it has good form: Support weight, transfer motion. That’s all it would think about, if it could think. It would be sublime. It wouldn’t have emotional hangups about rolling. It would just roll.
Focus on proper form brings success. Ego and anxiety often take focus away from form and result in failure. Fear of failure is common, but the experience that comes from failure shows you what not to do next time, and thus closer to proper form and successful performance. The smoothest way to reach successful performance is to concentrate on the task at hand and leave other things, particularly your appraisal of yourself, out of it. Focus on form.
Ego interferes with form. After I drive to the skate park, I warm up with short strides for a few minutes. Before long, I begin to get the hang of it. But I am so overcome with pride of my new ability that I get a little carried away. I forget that I got this far by concentrating on form and I start thinking I’m hot shit. Then I push with my back leg without thinking about keeping balanced on my front leg, and my skateboard shoots out from under me. I wipe out and fall ass-first on asphalt, and my skateboard, perfectly a skateboard, is perfectly indifferent. It rolls away without me. I get up as quickly as I can and chase the mother fucker. My pride and my body take a few lumps, but I can only laugh.
Ego and self-consciousness negatively affect form. I can laugh about falling off of my skateboard because I don’t have any hangups about it. I don’t use it estimate my value as a person or my feelings about myself. I’ve only just started, and I practice alone. When I fall down, when the board goes flying off without me, I do not feel any anxiety. There’s nobody to tell me how great I am. There’s nobody to tell me how much I suck. So I tend not to think about how much I suck. I get off my ass, I think about what might’ve went wrong, and then I try something else. I return to form and modify what I’m doing. I tend to improve. And every once in a while, I learn something new.
Fear of failure suffocates good form. I was smitten with comics since the first time I saw a Ninja Turtles comic strip. I decided at 4 years old that I was going to be a comic book artist. I have over the years received heaps of praise for anything I draw by my friends and family. I believed I was better than I actually was until I realized the enormous gulf between my skill and the skill of my favorite artists. This realization nags my mind every single time I try to draw anything now, and a lot of the time, I will get halfway through a drawing only to realize I don’t know how to draw something. I then become overwhelmed with anxiety and self-doubt. I could deconstruct the thing into something simpler and then add in unique details until it looks like what it’s supposed to look like. But, instead of focusing on form, I focus on how much I suck because I don’t know how to draw the foot from this crazy angle. I feel tense. I focus on how I’ll never become good enough to become the thing I’ve wanted to be since I was a little boy. Then I put the pencil down and walk away from my failure.
Failure is a part of learning. I haven’t really practiced stopping on my skateboard at all. When I do, I expect to fail. And because I don’t have anyone cheering or jeering me, and because I don’t derive any self-worth from my ability to skateboard, I don’t mind failing. (I also enjoy it a ton more.) This expectation of failure is not emotional for me–I recognize it as part of the process, not proof that I am incapable. After spending so much time trying to keep my weight on my front leg, now I have to figure out how to shift my weight onto my back leg and skid to a stop? That’s going to take a lot of falling down to figure out, and when I fall down, I’ll just stand back up again, think about what I did wrong, and try something different. It’s no skin off my nose. (Unless I fall on my nose.)
My skateboard is a nearly perfect object. It doesn’t overestimate its abilities. It doesn’t underestimate its abilities. It doesn’t sway to praise, nor to critique, it doesn’t derive its worth and doesn’t suffer anxieties from what it can or can’t do. If it could think, it would think about nothing but rolling. But that’s not impressive: It’s a goddamned piece of wood. It should feel lucky it doesn’t have a storm of doubt or ego to distract it.
Focusing on form is not easy, but it’s where learning starts. The only easy part about learning or getting good at something is getting frustrated and lost in the fog of cacophonous mind–and then giving up. For me, a pencil is heavier than a 50lb dumbbell. Meanwhile, a skateboard gives me the special opportunity to fall wildly on my ass and I eagerly get back up for more. I am trying to get back into drawing, and it’s gotten a lot easier to drag myself through the self-doubt and criticisms that plague me since I begun playing with my skateboard. It still doesn’t care who I am, and it doesn’t care about my gratitude. And though it’s just a goddamned piece of wood, it has taught me to separate my evaluation of my self-worth and my evaluation of my performance. To concentrate on the task at hand, as well as how to correct my errors, instead of focusing on my deficiencies and sinking myself in self-criticism.
Even as I fail to reach the result I wanted, I bring myself out of the panic that comes with thinking that I’ll never be good enough to be a real artist. I look at what I’m trying to draw and try to break it down into simpler shapes. I speak out loud to myself or take notes to intellectualize what I’m doing, and then I try again. When I get the result I wanted, I try to keep my ego in check in order to avoid rushing through the steps that brought me to success when I draw the next figure. When I don’t get the result I wanted, I try to keep my self-doubt in check to avoid the fear that my art will never get any better and might as well give up.
Breathe. Draw a circle. Lightly, lightly, lightly. Lay the lines for the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears, the hair. Go back, add definition and detail. Take a moment to look at the finished drawing. Check for error. Check for visually satisfying realization. Check for pop.
Okay. Breathe. Make corrections. Savor the image.
Draw another circle. Draw it light. Don’t think about whether or not you’ll be able to draw this. Don’t think about the one you just drew. Don’t think about anything but exactly what you’re doing, right now. Focus on the figure, focus on the form.
