A simple excuse

It’s funny how conventions always make me realize certain things about what I do and don’t want to do artistically. Last time I got burned out of cons, I stopped doing furry art regularly for almost a year. Since then I’ve never been able to throw myself into it fully as much as i did when I was in college or high school. Now I’m trying to prep for otakon, and even though experience from furry cons tells me I’m probably not going to sell a lot of prints or even originals I’m still going crazy trying to make sure I have enough of something just have crap on my table to prove I can art. It’s almost absurd, it feels financially wasteful and I’m sure I’m going to overwhelm my tendinitis if I end up taking too many commissions (which I will probably do, seeing as I can’t turn down any of them out of guilt/need to make up for the $350+ I’ll be spending at this con).  I at least hope that I can have some fun while there and see some interesting things.

But in terms of art, I’ve realized something lately. When people ask me ‘what do you paint?’ I almost never want to answer honestly. If I do, I usually sigh, mutter something about anime or anthro illustration and say ‘but I’m just doing it for the money’! If I was a professional comic book artist, I could say ‘oh I color (or write/illustrate) comics for a living!’ and that would be OK. Or I could say ‘I paint realisim and surrealism in acrylics and watercolors’ and that would be OK. Most of the time I fall back on my pseudo-career and just say ‘oh, I’m a web designer’ (which I’m terrible at, by the way – I can do it, but I don’t have the same passion or knowledge for graphic design as I do for painting) or generalize  ‘I’m a painter who does web design full time’.  

I want to be able to show my art to people and not feel ashamed. I’m not ashamed that I do “stupid’ furry stuff – I think it’s fun to draw silly cat people – or that I tend to end up drawing in an anime-influenced style – that’s much more acceptable these days. I’m ashamed because I’m not at all drawing or painting, in almost any piece in the last year or two (barring one or two examples), up to my full artistic potential.

So I want to concentrate now, dedicated, fully, to painting. From life or references, realistically. I've been looking up lots of tutorials lately, and drawing from references and life a lot more. I don’t feel a kinship to the furry fandom anymore like I used to – anything I draw furry lately has been commissioned or gifts. And I like watching good anime shows, and drawing fanart occasionally, but I’m not Totally Into It. My tendinitis has made it clear to me that doing full time commissioned illustrations within a narrow time constraint is not the life or workstyle that I can do, so I shouldn’t make it my ‘fantasy job’ as I’ve been so used to thinking. I need to up my standards and start submitting to galleries. When I find galleries that actually have realism paintings, portraits, landscapes, I feel envious and small. I feel the passion to paint again. I want to be in there doing that, too.

I’ve kept my distance from the contemporary fine art establishment for so long because I don’t really feel like I fit into it, I don’t really understand a lot of what goes on in contemporary artist’s minds when it comes to bullshitting paragraphs about works. But I’ll find my niche somewhere, underground. On the walls of a tattoo shop. In a van on the side of the road in cape cod. I want to be able to show my paintings to strangers and my family and my mom and be like ‘look how awesome my shit is, you asshole!’ instead of hiding it in sketchbooks and on the interwebs.

I’ll do other stuff too. I still want to finish a graphic novel someday. I still want to keep in touch with friends.  And I can’t say for sure what I want to do now. But I just know what I don’t want to do anymore, what feels empty and forced, and what I feel proud of.