the studio
hey — welcome to september. aka the dreaded month for students. aka the end of summers. aka I am feeling surprisingly hopeful about the whole thing. I think maybe four months of solitude does that to a person. I have lived more in my head these last couple months than I ever have. hard to say if that’s good or not. I imagine this is why patrick star is able to say those raw lines all the time. anyway.
I've been thinking a good deal about the idea of quitting art. I have always desperately held onto the belief that I'd never quit. or perhaps it's knowing that I will never quit. but why? it has been years. I am afraid of drawing. is it because I believe that talent exists, regardless of how insignificant it is when it comes to you and the relationship with your work? is it that it would be a shame if I were not creating? why? artmaking, writing, and its associated skills have already provided fruitful in other areas of my life. it helps me with structuring my ideas. it helps me with my commercial art. so why?
for around half of my high school years I was enamored with the idea of quitting in general. the freedom of it. after speaking with an olympic athlete I had started writing down the very first ideas for a novel that entirely revolved around the freedom of quitting. I didn't write it. perhaps it is more so about waiting until I can do justice to the story, or to my idea, which is silly, because there will always be distance between what your vision is for something and what the execution of that something is. it's what drives you to do more work. it's what makes the work human.
I've also been very guilty of trying to tie productivity to how I approach art. David Bayles and Ted Orland put it well in their book, Art & Fear: observations on the perils (and rewards) of artmaking:
You fall on and off this cycle because unconsciously you know this need to operationalize your art will not lead to the joy and understanding you seek. In a never-ending cycle, you reject the work you love to do because you’re burning out on building cultural products before your inner thoughts even get a chance out the door. You tell yourself you’re not an expert because you’re afraid to fail. Because what if you try to sell something, finally, in exactly your own voice, and people reject you anyway?
I think reading this book came at a very good time. It was right when I was starting to put words to the strange dread I felt whenever I tried to draw, and helped to articulate and give depth to where I was struggling to describe what the feeling was like. A little like an art teacher's hand guiding your pencil, but more freeing. Reading is, after all, a conversation between you and the page.
I also thought this idea of operationalizing art paired well with yanyi's letter, 'How Do I Rediscover the Joy of Writing?':
I didn’t like the feeling of failure, so I avoided it. I believed that self-surveillance was good, because surveillance was how capitalist interests had always coerced me to do my “best” work. Without surveillance, how would I measure success? More importantly, without surveillance, how would I prevent myself from predicting and avoiding failure? Failure I could not optimize. Failure I could not improve.
Which was interesting because this is exactly how I approached my writing for the majority of this summer. Write 50 poems, submit to 50 journals. Write 10,000 words per month (which I have always failed.) In this way of measuring I would be able to say I had devoted time to writing and improving my ability. This was, like yanyi, who worked in engineering, how I also measured success. I don't think this way of tracking your work is a total writeoff; having a goal meant I had reason to be disciplined, to devote time and energy to writing when I otherwise would not have because there was no end in sight. and I think working in business means this type of thinking comes easily. where it does start to harm, however, is the idea of failure. of not being able to prevent or optimize it. because as it is with writing and art, most of it that I make is bad. and that's part of it. it's hard to measure those failures the same way. like, maybe in July I wrote 7 bad poems and 3 good ones. or were they all good? did i even write 10? who even cares as long as I put pen to paper? who even cares what I write unless I put it out in the world? my duty to myself is to look at myself and my work and to see where i find myself and where to go from there. my duty to readers is to put out my best work and only my best work. my duty to other writers and artmakers is to show them the guts. the awful stuff. the drafts in between. if not to comfort then at least to share in the misery and freedom of writing badly.
another quote from Art and Fear:
The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential. X-rays of famous paintings reveal that even master artists sometimes made basic mid-course corrections (or deleted really dumb mistakes) by overpainting the still-wet canvas. The point is that you learn how to make your work by making your work, and a great many of the pieces you make along the way will never stand out as finished art. The best you can do is make art you care about — and lots of it!
it's a nice book. a reassuring book. it reminds me that my relationship with commercial art is nowhere near as fraught as it is with non-commercial art. perhaps because it's more about the end product rather than the process. anyway, speaking of commercial art, here's some illustrations I worked on this week:
I'm rather pleased with how they turned out. I have several failed drafts where I couldn't get things to work. and I remember just having to sit down and allocate extra time for myself for those failed drafts. now that I'm done I'm thinking about what I could have changed, where I will do things differently in my next work. the process is largely the same as regular artmaking but there's no fear. why, brain?
thanks to this newsletter and the power of writing things down I was finally able to do a little bit of drawing. some of them were mark-making studies off other people's art so I won't share those, but here's a quick funny little bird that I made warming up for the commercial stuff:
I'd like to end this week's dispatch with another quote from Art & Fear that makes me feel particularly hopeful. both about the prospect of my future artmaking and I hope it makes you feel hopeful, too:
Most of us spend most of our time in other peoples’ worlds — working at predetermined jobs, relaxing to pre-packaged entertainment — and no matter how benign this ready-made world may be, there will always be times when something is missing or doesn’t quite ring true. And so you make your place in the world by making part of it — by contributing some new part to the set. And surely one of the more astonishing rewards of artmaking comes when people make time to visit the world you have created. Some, indeed, may even purchase a piece of your world to carry back and adopt as their own. Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality. The world is not yet done.
thanks for reading. hope you have a great start to your september :)
— jess
the gallery
miracle love by matt corby — I love this song. makes me feel like I'm standing in the rain. anyway my september playlist is out and I will be updating it throughout the month so if you like, give it a listen!
3 tips to drawing textures by alphonso dunn — I feel like I've just stumbled upon a whole treasure trove of instructional videos …. my hobby if you could not tell already is collecting learning resources that I won't get to for at least 2 years
stand by me, directed by rob reiner, based off the novella by stephen king — beautiful movie that has held up pretty well despite being like 35 years old. oh river phoenix… I care you. also it’s where this photoset is from which gutted me and convinced me to watch it in the first place
Deserter Pursuit, the kdrama based on webtoon series D.P. Dog Days by Kim Bo-tong — I picked this up because I like jung hae in but didn’t like him in very similar straight romance kdramas. got some good stuff— well choreographed fight scenes in film / tv. film direction that I vibed with. refreshing bits of levity in what is otherwise an intensely tragic drama that looks closer at south korea's conscription and opens up a conversation for the system so often romanticized by the kdrama itself. (update: while i was writing this i finished the rest of the season and i am still gathering my thoughts but. this turned out to be a really interesting exploration of how abuse begets abuse in all forms. last episode was a shitstorm!! i am very interested in what this director will continue to make in the future and also picking up the webtoon. if you’re thinking about picking this up i’d check out the trigger warnings first. all in all i really enjoyed and will be thinking about it for a while)
this letter by yanyi on building a writing / art habit — yanyi has a treasure trove full of letters on writing and on making art and they're all brilliant!! totally recommend
i think our son is gay by okura — a very cute and lighthearted manga!! since i don’t usually read or watch media that is happy this was a lovely change of pace
因为爱情 by eason chan and faye wong — another beautiful song that you can listen to below. yes I am cultivating the multimedia in the newsletter like it's a garden. what about it
what is miso, just one cookbook — in my rampant procrastination this week I spent a while looking at all the different types of miso. there are many. I want to eat them
how do I rediscover the joy of writing? by yanyi — another one that has got me thinking a lot about how I've been thinking about art making and where a lot of my excuses are from. reassuring yet motivating…. totally recommend
watch your head: writers and artists respond to the climate crisis, edited by Kathryn Mockler — finished reading this this morning and it was brilliant!! there's an online journal that you can read works at, but the print version is absolutely beautiful too and all proceeds go to RAVEN and Climate Justice Toronto.
a reason life is beautiful
while I was reading in the backyard I heard bagpipes out on the street because someone was walking up and down the road outside my house. just playing music for the entire neighbourhood. when I went out front to look, I didn't see anyone, but there was a girl in little red galoshes biking with her dad and they were holding hands while biking. they were moving slowly but without wobbling. they looked at me while I looked at them, like watching a beautiful animal look at you in the forest but you’ve been there long enough that they aren’t scared. which made me think about how tethering yourself to other people is like a tree growing roots to hold its own weight up. to talk to the sun. to bear fruit.