This kid who sat next to me though much of elementary school (thanks, alphabetization!) could draw anything. He could look at something, pick up a pencil, and recreate it on paper. His drawings were so good and so effortless, it was more like he was capturing what he saw and transporting it into a dimension that existed on the pages of his Trapper Keeper.
I was inspired by this kid, and I had a very vivid imagination, so I was constantly trying to draw things that I saw in my head, with …. poor results.
I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t understand perspective, I didn’t understand shading, and I didn’t have the innate ability that this kid and people like him had. I recall feeling frustrated and sad and eventually giving up.
I don’t know what happened to that kid, or if he ever did anything with his artistic talent. He’d be 43 now, too, which is kind of a mindfuck because I can only see him as a 3rd and 4th grader, sitting under the smog-filled sky of Los Angeles in the early 80s, drawing dragons and goblins and space ships on the playground.
Even though I was a child actor, and did a lot of work back then (good work, even), I didn’t think of myself as an artist or a creator until I was in my twenties. When I was a child, I didn’t have a choice about acting, so it was something I did because I had to. I did my best because I wanted and needed to please the adults around me, and because it’s what my parents expected me to do. It was never my choice.
It was never my choice.
Still, part of me wanted to make things where things weren’t before, so part of me was an artist, even though I didn’t know it. Part of me loved to tell stories and make things up about fantastic creatures and worlds and things that existed because I imagined them. That part of me was satisfied by and found a home in D&D, where I made up heroes and a world for them to fight and die in. Part of me was an artist, a storyteller, a creator. I just didn’t know that’s what we called people who liked to do the things that I liked to do. I thought that artists were, like, Picasso (and the only reason I knew that Picasso was a person and an artist was because I heard his name on commercials for the Norton Simon museum in Pasadena when I was watching Batman after school) and that they only did paintings that were either boring or weird.
In my defense, I was like nine years old.
As I grew older, and I slowly came to realize over the course of about fifteen years that I was actually an artist who needed to create things the way a normal person needs to eat food, I continued to express that part of me as an actor, but mostly as a writer (this is all covered in delightful detail in my sensational book, Just A Geek, kids! Buy ten copies and use eight of them to keep warm when the world ends!.)
I work as an actor and a writer now. I produce Tabletop and Titansgrave, and I’ll probably direct at least some short films before the end of next year. I’m still a creator, and I proudly and loudly accept that I’m a capital-a Artist.
…but I think about that kid from school all the time, and I think about how I have always wanted to be able to take things I see in my head, or things I see with my eyes, and recreate them with pens and pencils. Like, I’m really good at taking words and images and using my voice and body to turn them into emotional things for other people, whether I’m doing it on a television or (rarely) on a movie screen. I’m really good at doing it in voice-only situations, and I’m so proud of that that I don’t even feel like a giant self-absorbed dick saying that.
…Okay, I feel weird saying that, but at least I can say it and feel proud of it, and like it’s okay to feel proud of it, instead of the way I usually feel about everything I do.
So this is nearly 1000 words of introduction to get to this picture I drew last night.
It’s not that great, but it’s mostly what I saw in my imagination (the buildings) and the mountains (with my eyes when I was driving home). It was fun to draw it, and there were moments when I genuinely surprised myself. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a thing where there wasn’t a thing before, and I made it.
