Why do I have to choose?

For as long as I’ve been making art in my adult life, I have struggled endlessly with this one question, how do I choose to focus on one thing in my art when there are so many things I seem to like? When I ask this of myself, it is like asking what the meaning of life is. I go around and around in circles trying to figure out what I should be focusing on.

Over the years I’ve spoken to many people about this dilemma. Actually if you ask my husband, it isn’t a dilemma at all. His response is just ‘do what you feel like but keep it focused.’ That kind of response is like someone saying ‘blah blah blah, blah blah.’ I don’t compute any of it.

To give you an example, here are some of the things I am exploring at the moment.

There’s a lot going on here. Watercolour, oil paints, pencil, charcoal. Then there’s the genre, figurative and abstract, landscape, still life and portraiture. Black and white, colour, and sometimes black and white mixed with colour. When I look at it like this, it kind of looks like madness but this is what I have been creating recently. I even dabble in pastels.

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For a long time now I’ve wondered why I have this desperate need to try all the things all at once and I think that maybe if I am being honest with myself, this is not the work of someone who knows what they love to create.

To me, that reality is pretty brutal, because I thought I knew so I’m going to try to unpack my thoughts a bit more.

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I have flittered in and out of my artist practice many times and even though I studied art and used it extensively in my high school years, once I hit my late teens and early twenties I hardly created at all. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I came back to it but even then it was with so much trepidation that I spent more time in self doubt than I did actually making anything. Now, five years into “committing” to this art thing, I have not settled on anything to delve into deeper. And I say committing in commas because I’ve barely done that either. Commitment in itself, is something I have so much trouble with but let’s not go there right now.

So where does this leave me?

Well, I’m about two years into a fine arts degree and it has been the most eye opening experience in my artistic practice. It has given me the understanding that I am very much new in the my artistic journey. By new, I mean I do not have an established approach, preferred medium, style or genre and I have next to no idea who I am as an artist, what I want to explore in my art and what I want it to say.

I’d like to say that I was okay with this but instead I would berate myself for not having it together or not knowing what direction I want to go in. Lately however, I’ve been cutting myself a lot of slack. After all, it was only last year that I started keeping a sketchbook and putting my ideas into paper, rather than going straight into a final piece. It is only at the start of this year that I turned it into a daily habit. Which I realise now is priceless.

It also means accepting that I am very much in the infancy of my artistic journey. This also means allowing myself to drift, to experiment, to try different things in order to find out what it is I like to create and what it is I want to say. Some things I have figured out but those things are small.

There is also an incredibly important aspect to this exploration and that is a necessity to accept myself, to be honest in my art and self expression. To allow myself to put into my art what sits within me. It is something that I don’t find that easy. Actually that is putting it lightly. I find it bloody scary and intimidating.

If I allow myself to explore freely, then I would say I am at the beginning of my artistic journey and there will most likely be a lot more unfocused playing around in my art. Not with the desire to come to any grand end goal but rather to just enjoy all of the dabbling. In doing so I think I will settle. Maybe not on one thing but a few things, or maybe it will be the one thing that I get obsessed with. Who knows. I certainly don’t and I don’t think I need to know either.

Right now, I am choosing not to have to choose. But rather to just go with all of it. That makes sense to me.