Art, like life, has many ups and downs. It makes you question yourself.  It makes you question the way you see the world. Is this the right way to view the world? What can I not see today that would filter how I view life?

I am constantly amazed at how art challenges me. It guts me, honestly.

Does what I create have value? Does it matter in the grand scheme of things? Am I really contributing when I just make something pretty? What does this mean that I want to create?

These are the questions that swirl in my head. And no offense to other artists, but I constantly am met with this guilt:

I should seriously stop wasting my time on this… You need to be doing something productive. Something that contributes to society, not blowing your time on pretty pictures. (Here is where the A-Type moron meets the creative…)

But I still create – although not nearly as much as I’d like to. And I still am haunted by the lack of creation. I am not going to lie, it feels so selfish. To think that I have some kind of voice I need to express, some kind of message to give to the world though my art.  Who the hell am I? Besides, some of my art is messages, other times it just is pretty pictures.

I have been out of the art game for some time now, consistently anyway. I devoted my time to working in a company that ultimately humiliated me. Well, a superior, not my company. And I felt like I was contributing there. I felt like I was doing something valuable with my life – most of the time anyway. But why did I feel that doing work that was profitable, was more valuable than when I create? Who is telling me this? Who has sold me this bill of goods and told me that what I do, when I initiate it on my own, is not worth the same as the work I do when I support someone else’s vision, someone else’s mission?

Do I have some kind of outlook on my own creation that lessens it’s value? Do other artists think these things? How many other artists have given up, thrown in the towel, similar to me, that have deemed their artwork worthless in the grand scheme of things?

I am comforted by Eat, Pray, Love‘s author, Elizabeth Gilbert .  In her podcast with Tim Ferriss (http://su.pr/2XjW6D), she talks in depth about pushing through, showing up, and holding hands with fear, and allowing it to be present while continuing to show up and do the work.  The podcast is really, really great by the way… just in case you’re interested…

So I am attempting to show up. I am doing a “pretty work” right now and I am going to enjoy it. I am going to push through the fear that it’s worthless, that it doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of life. I am going to try to see this as something productive to the world (despite the demons in my head). I’m holding hands with fear and allowing it’s presence to be there, but choosing to just work alongside it.

When I first started taking art studio classes again after my 10 year hiatus, I was lost.  I couldn’t quite pick up the art lingo and tap into the key of understanding the art world and it’s thinking.  I hated conceptual art.  And what I don’t understand I tend to loathe.  But I knew I loved making art.  However, 3 semesters in, I am finding a new  love of art, conceptual and non.  I love how the creative process evolves with each new piece I make.

Art is teaching me to flex that creative muscle that has kept me in fear of doing things.  Because I didn’t have all the answers up front, I would be scared to begin a project or tackle something.  However, it has taught me that each project is an evolving work.  One might start out with a completed work in mind, but as you paint, sculpt, printmake, etc., you find yourself with a new idea building on top of the old.  It’s problem solving at its best.  And I am in love.

Recently, I have made a sculpture in my sculpture class through lost-wax casting out of aluminum.  I was so pressured to have this great, ground-breaking idea that it was paralyzing me to even get started.  So I let myself breathe, and just told myself, “Just do something, anything.”  And so I did.  A completely unoriginal,  stereo-typical type beginning art student idea.  And I told myself that it was okay, just get started.  So I began the relatively uncreative sculpture of a hammerhead shark with it’s tail that mimics a hammer end (the end that pulls the nails out).  As I began the project, my professor challenged my idea, “What if you actually mounted it on a wooden hammer handle?”  And I did.  But, after the weeks of polishing and perfecting my hammerhead aluminum piece  and mounting it on the hammer handle, I just hated it.  I felt like it was one of those pieces that I would chuck away to learning technique and learning the lost wax casting process.

However, as I was driving home from the sculpture lab yesterday, it just bothered me. “What does a hammerhead shark have to do with an actual hammer?  Why did I make such a basic piece?  Where is the creativity in this piece?” And then it struck me.  What if I changed the angles of the hammer handle?  What if I began thinking of this piece conceptually?  But what does carpentry have to do with hammerheads?  Jesus was a carpenter.   Jesus, according to Christianity,  is God and God created the hammerhead.  Then I began thinking of the Big Bang Theory and how funny it would be to wait around for millions of years for this piece to have all the right circumstances to be in existence…. But there was a maker who made it in an instant… Me.

All this to say, I drove straight home to begin the second session on my piece, chopping up and gluing this hammerhead handle together. And although it’s not in it’s completed form just yet, I now am excited about this piece.  It challenged me in thinking about angles, and how the space interacts with the piece, and how gravity interacts with it… It jived my creative juices and made me problem solve and assemble something that started out with little thought, but took me on a wild journey of concept thinking.

It’s nothing ground-breaking, but it sure taught me some ground-breaking lessons.