Pressing a piece of graphite onto the paper, I start with the hardest part of the drawing: the composition. The overwhelming part of the task is coming up with a representation of what I want to convey to the viewer. I want my art to be more than lines and shapes on a piece of paper. I want the bright red and yellow streak plastered along the subject’s eyes to illustrate that soft pain in my chest. When I start to feel that force coming out of my sternum and I hear my heart beating. That calming feeling was just the beginning, but everything feels alive when my heart beats faster and the high I knew was coming finally arrives. That’s the excitement the person I am drawing is feeling. I can see these colors when I feel this way, and I release them with a flick of my arm. I take a deep breath until the carbon dioxide in my chest becomes too full to hold and release oxygen into the air.
The scratching of my pencil follows the inner workings of my brain, and as my thoughts become more and more knotted, my art takes a greater form. As time goes by, I start to wander off and reflect on my inner and outer perceptions. I have ‘disorganized control’ over my drawing. My drawing doesn’t always follow the direction of a linear line, but is more like a parabolic curve: it is more complex. Once I finish the hard part, I begin with the more enjoyable part: the shading.
I enjoy working with black, white, and grays but occasionally other colors on the wheel elevate the meaning of my work. I rely on introspection for inspiration. Millions of brain cells communicate before a burst of electricity lights them up. They are all working together for a thought, and suddenly a color becomes more than just something that will help my drawing. I mix red and blue and observe how water mixes with the paints to create a swirl. As I move my arm in a circular motion, the colors unite. I make the first mark, and suddenly one becomes two hundred. I spend hours, focusing on the chiaroscuro, the light and dark, of this piece. I show my experiences within each nanometer. The light shows the calm, the expected, the comfortable. Dark represents the fear, the uncertainty, the doubt. Most of my drawings, though, are values in between. It’s the experience of living, of having both good and bad times. Moving through my artwork with a finger in a different direction won’t modify change. That’s what can be certain in my artwork: every pixel, every day isn’t the same. When I finish, I show others.
The audience’s reaction is a fluctuating wave: up, down, and everything in between. I can never calculate what they will say or how they will feel. Not everyone will like it, but they can still interpret something. The beauty is that everyone has a different reaction as they view my work. They all have different internal neural oscillations, and this difference is one reason why creating art is rewarding. Everyone takes their past experiences to make something new based on the many marks on a paper. It’s people’s experiences that change how they view my art, so it’s not just me in the art. It’s them too.
Throughout these last couple of months, I have realized that my plans won’t always manifest into something clear. A plan doesn’t always lead to a specific outcome. It’s the ‘disorganized control’ that can turn a good composition into a great one. Although the future is uncertain, I can still live in the present and focus on the values that will come about today. The experience of making artwork is what makes me feel my feelings. It’s what separates something with uniform acceleration from something with accelerated motion. Accelerated motion doesn’t have a constant change; it’s harder to predict how fast it (an object) will move. It’s these mathematical problems that are not always the easiest to solve, but the most rewarding once accomplished.
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