Onward, but Upward?

zoo sketch, 2018 

zoo sketches, 2019

It's fall!

Well, from a technical-calendar point of view. We're still hitting highs in the 90s here in Nashville. (Global warming? Curse of a summer witch? Regardless, it still sucks). I'm ready for fall to arrive this year, and there have been a couple days when the wind hit the hills just right, and autumn began to sing in the air... But those days have sadly been all too few for a late September. I'm ready for the seasons to change, and I'm hoping to summon up some holiday spirit this year. As faithful Roost-ers may know, last year I couldn't really catch any holiday excitement until Easter. I even didn't have a costume ready for Halloween (one of my recurring childhood nightmares, believe it or not). I expect things may be different this year. I've already started to dip into my fall playlist and listen to old-timey tunes. Cause for me, fall is a time for old things. Old farmhouses draped in decaying leaves. Dusty antiques of a nostalgic era. Ragtime and folk music.

Fall also feels like a good time to read (perhaps old books) and reconsider my modern assumptions about the world, one of which I wanted to talk about today. The idea of the onward and upward, specifically when it comes to practicing art or honing any type of craft. That the two are invariably linked. (Disclaimer: most of what I'm about to say is inspired by and an artsy paraphrase of this Joshua Gibbs article. Didn't want you to get any ideas that I'm smarter than I actually am.)

I think there's always this expectation that as long as you practice, things will get better. In vague metaphorical terms - If you are going onward, then you are inherently going upward too. And while this may be true in the extremely long term, on a daily, weekly, or even yearly basis it doesn't seem so convincing. Any of us who make something (art, homes, artisan cat food) know the feeling. No matter how much you practice, sometimes nothing (or everything) comes out right. Often this is accompanied by other events. You get art block. Your dog dies. You fall in love. You watch 24 straight hours of Ghibli movies. All of these will directly affect your art, yet none of them are practice-related. What gives? You have may already guessed, dear reader, the trick: art doesn't just flow from skill, but also inspiration, joy, loss, wisdom, luck - in other words, from life. To quote Gibbs more directly here, "If [art] has anything to do with life, the quality of an [artist's] work will be a bit uneven - just like life itself is uneven."

If you look an artist's entire body of work, you're not going to see a steady rise, where each piece is better than the last. Rather, the line on the Graph of Goodness is going to be all over the place - sporadic masterpieces, periods of drought, times of learning and breakthroughs. This pattern can be found in other areas of life - I know this process has been particularly true in my faith. Despite my efforts, my relationship with God goes through periods of stagnation, passion, instruction, growth, and stagnation again. The amount of Scripture reading, church visiting, and other disciplines do not always have a direct correlation to the quality of the finished work, my relationship with God. Here's an example from the art zone: each school year I do an illustration of me and our school mascot, a bison. But I haven't made one for this year. To be honest, the real reason why I haven't is that I don't know how to top last year's drawing. I'm worried that this year's will not be much better (or perhaps worse!) than the one I did last year. Yet I have a desire to show everyone that I'm making significant progress. Cause if I don't know how to draw a better bison after a whole year of schooling, what am I doing with my life??

Enough about me. Let's look at the example of Brad Bird. He starts incredibly strong with The Iron Giant (1999), following that up with The Incredibles (2004), which may just be the most perfect animated film ever made.  Ratatouille (2007) is good, but not Incredibles level, and I don't know much about Ghost Protocol (2011).  But Tomorrowland (2015) was a forgettable flop and Incredibles 2 (2018) an underwhelming sequel. Brad Bird, an animation wizard, still makes mistakes, even later in his career.

The point is that anything that involves some level of artistry is going to involve your life in some way. So unless your life is quickly and methodically progressing towards perfection, don't expect your art to either. Sometimes, life and art just suck. And in this fallen world, that's natural. I think that's one of the most important things for me to remember. When you see someone doing KILLER work - the kind of stuff that hits you with a double-punch of inspiration and jealousy (Saira Vargas for me recently) - that is unnatural (or perhaps super-natural). The paint and the artist's hand didn't naturally want to do that, but through mastery of nature, the artist has made it so. Although Instagram does a good job of hiding this, that art was born of struggle, perhaps years of accumulated struggle. Babies can't draw well, or make coffee well, or love well, because they haven't fought for it yet. It's a process that takes time and heartache - the combination of dutiful practice, and the experience of life. And plenty of mistakes and bad drawings. 

One of my biggest fears is that I'll slip backwards and get worse at art. But the important thing to remember is that me sucking at art is natural. My hand wants to make awful, jagged lines. My brain wants to draw everything all stiff and out of perspective. Therefore, it's a supernatural feat of will to make something truly beautiful. The real danger creeps in when you think you are above error - a straight A artist. There's a saying in the art community that your hand has 1,000 or 10,000 or so bad drawings in it that you got to get out. Which implies that you'll reach a point where the bad drawings stop. When every drawing will be golden. But as Rebecca Sugar says in this panel, it's always a struggle. No matter how much you draw, those bad drawings are never truly over. It's like running - if you're not having trouble, you're probably walking. Wow. Doesn't that just make you want to be an artist?! 

No really - Isn't that great? We're not expected to be perfect, and our art shouldn't be either. All we can do is show up every day, and try to grow in righteousness and skill. It's the showing up that's important - the practice in the midst of the hard times, independent of the final results. I think we can be more proud of a decent drawing born on a bad day than a fantastic drawing created on a great one. Cause although Instagram and studio recruiters will judge them equally, we know that it took buckets more motivation to make the former. And it's the building of good habits, of good person-age, that will likely serve us better in the days to come.

Can I get an amen, bloggerfolk?

Hope this post finds you well, wherever in life you may be. Let me know what's up in the comments.
-dh