Letter Never Sent

I got a Netflix account recently, and this weekend I watched The Royal Tennenbaums again since I hadn’t seen it since it came out. It really inspired me to want to do more creative endeavors. Mainly during the parts of the movie involving all the little pet projects of the Tennenbaum children: painting, building model stage sets, writing, etc. Although I always seem to have an endless amount of work to do I have really missed my more creative side. Somewhere along the way I stopped devoting as much time to playing with pens and pencils, and I made drawing into something more like a burden or obligation, an activity where the expectation of a potentially dissatisfying outcome was foremost in my mind. But, I have missed drawing and making things. Making something can put you into a zen-like state. There are times when I’m drawing or doing something and I sit back in amazement at how the act of creation takes on a life of its own and how it can induce such a state of wordless wonder. Even if you have a particular vision of how things will turn out, the result is always a surprise. I think it is the talent for working with chance that makes an artist. You have to come to some sort of agreement with the medium that you will try to see things through even if the results deviate from your imagination. You have to be somewhat open and loose, receptive to a wide variety of possibilities. I think the importance of technique is in the expansion of possibility and the flexibility it lends to converting chance and possiblity into something surprising.