Theme song

Rarely can I find the right words to explain what I feel or what I think and when I try, somehow or other, I end up offending someone. And so, when I stumble across something or someone that captures my feelings it brings me to tears. Today was one of those days.

 Music writen and performed by Tanya Davis, Video and paintings by Andrea Dorfman 

In my little bio thing I said that some days I think of myself as an A/r/tographer and others I don’t, truthfully - more often than not – I don’t (although pretty much everyday I want to be). I constantly doubt myself. I know that I have the technical skill in textiles, ceramics (even drawing and painting but I seem to have developed a phobia of these medium somewhere along the road and perhaps should examine why in some more detail...but not right now because this side note has grown pretty long) I have confidence in my craftsmanship BUT I have almost no belief in my imaginative capacity. I don’t really believe that I have anything new to say or even a new way of saying it. I don’t really believe that I have anything of interest to say (or anything at all to say for that matter ...look at the title of this blog for goodness sake!)

In primary school I was always the best artist. I remember my third day of primary school I was sent to the head teacher’s office to show him just how wonderful the 3 clowns I had drawn were (the first day we had drawn 1 apple, day 2 was 2 balls). I was the only child who helped with the “teddy bear picnic” wall display in primary 2 and in primary 7 I was solely responsible for  the classes contribution to the giant school calendar (December). Secondary school however was a shock. There were plenty of wonderful artists among my classmate; then came weekend art classes at the art school, portfolio preparation classes and eventually Art College. I was increasingly surrounded by people who could see and create wonderful things but rather than being inspired I was intimidated. I dropped out of college. 

Actually it was more than dropping out of college; I dropped out of Art.

Slowly I am finding my way back in, very slowly indeed. Like I said, I am almost phobic of painting and drawing (well actually it’s kind of similar to my feelings about doing the dishes – I enjoy doing the dishes when I do them but in between times I forget this and use every trick possible to avoid doing them). I have a bunch of sketch books, barely used (if used at all); this one is too big to fit in my bag, that one is too small and makes me draw too tightly, that white paper is so pure and would be ruined by my marks, that one’s paper is too thin, that one’s pages are to good and thick for simple sketches, I have special plan for that one but I don’t have time for it right now. But every now and the one of them is graced with a sketch or a visual map or an exploration and I am learning to look at work of other artists and be inspired rather than intimidated and to use it to generate new ways for me to interpret myself, the world and our interactions. 

The next great challenge is to actually share what I do with other people. I was hoping that by the time I wrote this all down I would be ready to say “and hey, this is the place for it. I commit to using this blog as a space for exhibiting my artistic enquiries!” but no, I am still to scared for that so I guess it’s just “we’ll see” and “I’ll try”.

I guess I have a longer way to go than I hoped.

The tone of this entry isn’t quite what I had thought it would be. Oh well. Here's an extra bit with a different tone:

Andrea (who did the video) has 9 videos on her  youtube channel with text either writen by herself, her boyfriend or her friends, but each of the could have been writen by my (if I could write in a playful, witty way) and I may need to dedicate a post or two to some of them in the future but I leave you with this one. I swear, if it wernt for the freckle line I would think she was inside my head. She even has Gábor's dance down.