Learning to free myself with making art
I am one of those designers who can’t draw to save their lives. I wasn’t interested in art in school. My interest and appreciation in art only began a couple of years ago, and I started painting using watercolours last year. They were not very good, but I learned not to care:
A while ago I started experimenting with the Apple Pencil. These were the first few pieces I created:
I had focused so much on designing solutions and utility for people, that I think I lost my self along the way. In art, there are no solutions, no logical wayfinding. There is a blank canvas, and we try to express a piece of ourselves into it. It is an act of faith and vulnerability, to not know where we’re heading and yet proceed anyway.
Art is a mirror. It is a mirror of ourselves, and in a magical way, it serves as an array of mirrors for other people who experience it. By making more of it we add layers of dimensionality to this world.
It is a non-verbal language, allowing us to communicate in ways words and rhetoric cannot. I think I am communicating parts of my unconscious to myself when I make art, and I find a little of my self, I discover a little more of myself. I start to realise the knowing in this world does not only come in the form of knowledge.
The human mind itself, is a magical system. It possesses so much creative imagination, but the same imagination can be an invisible prison. It imagines dreams, yet it imagines limits. We can see a blank canvas as paralysing, or imagine its infinite possibilities.
Working on experiments requires my mind to be free, to embrace a beginner’s mindset — capable of exploring avenues without shutting down possibilities, to experience the simple joy of working and not be too caught up with the outcome. We could say the same of living. Yet experience is a double-edged sword, it allows us to project multiple outcomes quickly but the very same capability is a liability when it comes to non-linear, non-judgemental explorations that could potentially bring us outcomes we would not expect of. When it comes to art, I am a beginner. That beginning is intimidating and yet it can be liberating.
I didn’t want my mind to set the limits of what I can or cannot do, simply because it has been conditioned to think a certain way. I once thought art was a vanity project, only to learn how difficult it can be to sit and let myself go enough to access that part of me that is willing to create freely without judgement or pre-conceived limitations.
It is essentially a form of meditation, to train our minds to go to a place where we can be free.
Through working on these pieces I feel like I am slowly lifting off the debris that has formed over those years I was made to believe I was a certain way. To get to a point where I can be comfortable and not painfully embarrassed about sharing the art I had made, I have to really believe in the idea that it is not about how good it is, but the value comes from having the courage to express a piece of myself.
It is a form of purity: to feel like a child again, to allow ourselves to play and express simply because we are, not because we’re trying to gain a competitive advantage or demonstrate our worthiness.
Each time I try to work on a piece it is a practice — I feel the blockages, the limits, the judgment. Slowly layer by layer I have to peel them off in order to just let the art find its own life through the workings of my hands.
There is an undeniable truth in what Mr Rogers said in the first graphic above. The art we make is a consequence of who we are as individuals, carrying an unique imprint upon this world. Whatever we make, no matter how bad we think it is, can only be made by the person we are, and no one else.
That in itself is freeing, it shakes me slightly free of the mould that the system has shaped over decades of my life. I feel a little closer to the core of myself and the world, because the beauty of aliveness cannot be expressed using mere words.
Maybe by learning to give myself the space to make art, I will learn to embrace life with a similar free spirit and ambiguity — just like art, I have to let go and let life unfold, and to free myself of my invisible prison by removing the lenses of judgment.
Consider being the Patreon of my life’s work with $1 a month. :)
