ARTIST
For as long as I can remember, art has been a part of my life. Growing up and watching my dad design buildings and my mom decorate the inside of those same buildings, I was always allowed the creative freedom to practice art. Every summer, my parents would send me away to art camps and even when I was stuck at home, our laundry room drawers were always overflowing with colored pencils, pastels, and watercolors. Over time, my childhood hobby became a passion. But I kept it a secret. It was the only real part of me I had left when the archetypes began to take over, but as I associated more with these roles, and hid behind one of my various shields, the vulnerability in my work disappeared, the colors began to fade, and the art slowed down. Then I got to the second half of high school and talk of college and adult jobs started to steer my interests in different directions. Through these conversations, it was clear to me that art, or any creative pursuit for that matter, was useless in the superficial effort to be “successful.” So I took a bigger step back from art and soon I was simply a humble observer and no longer the creator I’d once been.
I didn’t notice how sad that distance made me until my junior year of college, when my archetypes began to crumble. That fall, I applied for a specialty print class in the search for something I’d lost, a connection to an old passion. Somehow I got in.
When I walked into the first day of art class, I was purely intimidated. I hadn’t created in a long time, and I was certain my art would be immediately weeded out as fraudulent by my classmates. They all seemed to know each other and sat on stools around four butcher block tables that had been pushed together. Keao’s face was the only one I recognized. We’d crossed paths a few times freshman year but were never friends.
As the quarter progressed, it turned out that Keao and I both liked working in the studio late at night. While we rolled our prints through the press, he’d tell me stories about growing up in Hawaii and his perspective on life. I saw his passion for his stories and drive for his work. He didn’t let others define him, he let his art do that.
I had the perfect opportunity to do the same, but so far, none of my projects felt like they were all that important. My art wasn’t about myself. It relied on other people’s stories that I found interesting. I told myself it was because I had lived an unremarkable life, that I didn’t have anything important to say, but telling other people’s stories was just another crutch I rested on, keeping me from doing the work to know my true self.
One-night, half-way through the quarter, Keao was working on his next project: a series of t- shirts that he was going to use as proof of concept for his brand, and I sat at the central table reading what felt like a hundred New Yorker articles hoping one of them would pique my interest. “Ugh what am I going to do for this project?” I complained to Keao as he waited for the dye sublimination machine to heat up. I bowed my head and pressed my hands against my temples.
“What story is important for you to tell?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Use that then.”
“What do you mean?”
“Figure it out.”
I rolled my eyes. That wasn’t the most helpful thing to hear. I had wanted him to tell me what I should think was important, what story I could pass off as self-exposure. Instead of something concrete, he asked me to reflect on a problem I’d always brushed off. I’d been pretending for too long, and now, I was scared to look within, unsure of what would be left. I tried to ignore the pit in my stomach but couldn’t focus on anything except the overwhelming feeling of emptiness. I couldn’t be in the studio anymore. I packed up to go back to my dorm. “See you later,” Keao said out the door as it shut behind me. It was 2 am and he was still going. How did he still have more to give to his art?
I shivered as the cold outside air hit me. I felt tears welling up behind my eyes. Why had I said I didn’t know? It was instinct for me to look to Keao to give me an answer. But why? I knew that I cared. I knew that I had stories to tell. I loved my family and my friends, but that’s what everyone said, it wasn’t interesting. I used to love reading, but I hadn’t picked up a book in months, maybe even a year. I loved learning, but lately all my classes felt like checking a box that led to an uncertain future. When I got to my dorm, my stomach was twisted in knots. The edge of my bed sank as I reached for the journal on my desk. I needed something to ground me. Maybe if I could put the way I was feeling into words, I could begin to unravel my problem. “It feels like I’m floating through space, unattached, untethered,” I wrote, “like there are amorphous things around me that I care about, but are just out of reach.” A page and a half later, I didn’t feel any better, but I had decided to lean into the feeling of instability. I couldn’t pretend anymore. That night, I laid awake for hours staring at my ceiling, kicking myself for admitting that I didn’t know what stories were important to me. Keao wouldn’t judge me, but how could I have lived this long actively avoiding figuring out what mattered to me?
Over the next week, I couldn’t get this question out of my head. Other classwork became unimportant as I sat in the same stool night after night under the fluorescent lights slowly carving my story into the block of linoleum, accepting that I had done this to myself. For the last twenty years, I’d not only allowed, but encouraged others around me to define me. This habit created a void within myself that until now, I had been able to ignore. The external validation for my characters was enough. But it was hard to pretend with art. I’d isolated myself and was uninspired. I used the art to figure out why I didn’t know what stories were important to me. There was something different about my prints this time. My self-portrait inscribed with the words I don’t know showed where I was in life, at the precipice of a reckoning of self. The image on my block was raw and vulnerable. I knew I had created something real.