Being Bad at Art

Lovely.
There are currently three people on NUF using something I've made as their avi.

Me (naturally)

Cupcake Ninja (to my everlasting regret)

Westeller (Because I couldn't resist)

I was feeling kinda bloggy.

I've generally always considered myself as being at art. I don't just mean in the sense of drawing/artworks, but just about anything that required a creative aesthetic has been something of a problem for me. On seeing the disconnect between what I've imagined and what I've actually had the capabilities to create, and on seeing the disconnect between what I was able to create as compared to my peers, rather than feeling encouraged to try harder, I just gave up altogether.

Well, that's not entirely true. As my peers and I grew out of being children and into being temperamental teenagers, I discovered that I did have some small measure of talent in a field that surpassed any of my other friends. Namely, I was much better at eliciting shock and horror. This was at an impressionable age where being excluded was the greatest fear one could have, so I honed this facet of me desperately in order to seem interesting and thus be "part of the group".

Perhaps I'd always been somewhat drawn to the macabre and unwholesome; as a five or six year old I recall finding an anti-abortion book and reading it voraciously, not for the ideology but for the numerous stories of botched abortions which awoke within me some kind of proto-sexual arousal. In any case, as time went on I found myself more interested in creating a bizarre performance than in "fitting in". I might not have been able to paint my delusions on a canvas, but I could evoke an emotional reaction nonetheless.

I was a scary clown back before it was cool!...and then it became, like, a thing people did and that ruined it....

As time moved even farther forward, though, my personal failings and disappointments pressed ever heavier against my back. Friends moved to far flung corners of the world, getting jobs and families in the process. I screwed up a series of romantic relationships at the same times I screwed up my education and career. The only performance I had left in me was a self-destructive spiral of self-isolation.

I went to go re-examine my life. It was all well and good to focus on what I had some talent in, but perhaps in giving up on everything else I've just been telling myself I can't take any path but the easiest one. Maybe I've just never been willing to struggle for any significant amount of time to improve something I'm not already relatively good at..and the problem is that, in this world, there's almost always going to be someone better than you.

Anyway, I drew a couple of things. I'm not particularly interested in validation or criticism (mostly because, seeing as this is my first time drawing in nearly a decade, I don't even have the basics down yet), but I was compelled to share some of the nicer ones regardless.

A Flower of Flesh

Fellow Daoist, please stop manspreading on the subway

A Somali Immigrant, Maybe?

Hmm, I might have a fetish.