On not being an artist...

When I was young the first thing I can remember wanting to be when I grew up was an artist.  It's the only thing I can remember wanting to be.  I never harboured secret desires to fly planes or be a doctor or fashion designer - all things I can recall my primary school friends saying they aspired to.  I only ever wanted to be an artist.

As early as I can remember I was drawing - on walls, sheets, book flyleaves, anything I could find.  I coveted one of those wonderful sets of Crayola crayons that had 48 different colours.  Colours like periwinkle, mahogany, flesh and prussian blue.  How politically incorrect some of the colour names were and indeed, in the early 1960's, flesh was changed to peach and prussian blue to midnight blue.  I loved those big green and yellow cardboard boxes of crayons and can also remember with huge delight when I finally got one of those boxes as a present. What a wondrous assortment of crayons.  With this I could finally be a child artist.  I coloured things like mad. These crayons were precious to me and I remember nearly killing my baby brother when he broke one.  I kept the box in pristine order and always put the crayons back in the correct order.

It wasn't till I was a bit older (10 or so) that I discovered that you could put a crayon on the hot radiator in my house, those old cast iron ones, and they would melt into wonderful little puddles.  When the melted crayons re-hardened I would have little balls of colour that I could still use to draw.  Of course, this didn't always work and sometimes there would be little gooey puddles of colour all over the floor and then my mum would hit the roof!  The trials and tribulations of being a young artist!

When I was about eight years old my aunt and uncle bought me a paint-by-numbers set.  Fantastic!  Not only could I demonstrate my artistic prowess by never going outside the outlines, but I could now paint real masterpieces.  I adored these sets and always wanted more.  I do recall that one of my early creations was a painting of a clipper ship on the high seas - all billowing white sails and blue skies. With great pride I presented the completed work to my dentist and he displayed this in his office.  I am not sure how soon after this he committed suicide because of a brain tumour, but I like to think he appreciated my work for its incipient talent rather than his disturbed mental state.

Looking back on the drawings and painting I did what strikes me is how confident I was about showing my work to everyone.  I was so proud of what I did and so filled with self-belief in my talents.  When did that change?  I know that I still felt that confidence in secondary school, but it seemed to have changed in university. 

As a fine arts student in university I was required to produce a certain amount of work each term.  This work generally went into open exhibitions and was critiqued by my fellow students and tutors.  At some point I realised that my artistic output was a way of unconsciously revealing myself to others and I didn't like that at all.  Once my work became personal, once it was no longer paint by numbers, it became very scary to open it up to the criticism of others. Sadly, that fear of showing myself through my work stopped me from becoming an artist. 

My last submitted work in university was pop art based.  Not personal in any way, or at least not personal in a way in which I felt threatened by.  I know now, with hindsight and therapy under my belt, that it had nothing to do with my work.  My talent was never in dispute. I am not Michelangelo, but I am a competent artist with a good eye and a nice line.  I gave up my childhood dreams much more because I became unsure of myself, who I was and how to present myself to the world.  I was only 16 when I started university and maybe every teenager goes through a crisis of confidence, but sadly mine changed the dream of a lifetime.
I wish someone had seen this and helped me to overcome these feelings.  My career might have been very different.

Sometimes I still paint or draw.  Mostly I channel my creativity into crafts.  I knit, sew, cook and make things. I love doing this and it gives me great pleasure to create mini works of art in this way.  I don't know if I would ever have become the artist I dreamed about when I was little, I never really tried. But maybe, because of this, I went on to become a really good people trainer and developer.  I found another way to express my creativity.  it just took a while to find it.

Last year I bought myself a paint by numbers set, for old times' sake.  I loved it.  It gave me such childish pleasure to quietly concentrate on not going outside the lines and no, I didn't need to show anyone the finished masterpiece this time.  It was just for me.