wr_essay_aspiring
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Dear Everyone,
I wrote this text for myself.
It is a love letter to all creative arts, to personal projects and learning;
a reminder of the things, which motivate me each day
and a critique of our society, for focusing products and goals,
instead of people and processes.
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In the last days, I've cuddled up in my own head.
After hitchhiking trough the Sahara and West-Africa, I felt a strong need to 
sit still for a while. So here I am at the drawing board,
living in a world of lines,silhouettes and shades and also words & thought.
I'm not aiming for anything in specific. I'm just excited and curious, 
about what happens, when I give myself more time and focus to draw and write.

During the hours of silent work, I thought about my own story 
and how it has been shaped by creative work over the last ten years. 
Back then, fourteen-year-old-me tried to create video game levels.
For the first time, I found myself sketching down ideas and 
tried to build a world from my imagination.
Right from the start, this fundamentally changed my life.

Trough my work within the digital fabric of video games, 
I started to see the real world with different eyes;  -curious eyes-. 
I payed attention to silhouettes; to shapes and sizes of architecture; the texture of tree bark;
the wideness of corridors, stairs and doors; how light and shadow create a feeling of space; 
the delicate structure of insect wings and the dazzling complexity of how water reflects light.
Trying to recreate the world in drawings and models, every single thing in existence, 
became interesting.

-And it didn't stopped at how things look.
As I spent more and more time with painting and level design, 
I started to reflect on how an image is percieved.
In the end, I cared for the experience of the viewer, not the image in itself.
So I started to ask myself questions like: How can I guide people's movement within space? 
How does color affect emotions? How do we percieve "visual weight"? 
What do we generally percieve as beautyful/ What do I perceive as beautyful 
- How can I recreate that?

Walking trough the forests of my home village, I noticed the immense detail of everything.
How unique and complex every single shape in this place was. 
The multitude of life made me realise how humble my own abilities of recreating were, 
against the complexity of our nature. It gave me a new appreciation, a new sense of wonder 
towards this world and it made me feel grateful 
to exist as a part of it.

When drawing people, I failed at capturing the right expression of faces again and again 
and for the first time, I noticed how delicate our perception and expression of mimics 
and gestics is. What I had always thought of as a simple & basic part of life,
reveiled itself as an utterly complex and sophisticated facette of the human experience.
Drawing more people, I payed attention to pose. How do we sit and stand?
This quickly derailed from the purely visual aspect, as I noticed 
how poses and position in the room were in itself a part of human communication; 
each pose creating a certain "athmosphere", expressing the social constellation in a group 
and giving insight into the inner workings of a person.

From the simple wish to create video-game levels, had arisen a wide awake interest.
A motivation to pay close attention to my surroundings and understand them.
It sparked a relentless rush of self-education, 
as I started to reflect on the very basic aspects of being.

In addition to that. Working on my level projects, I had something that was mine.
This was a project that I had started on my own, without anyone telling me what to do.
It were my decisions that shaped this; It was my thought and my skill 
that would create something new. For the start, well..
there was not a lot of skill and what was mine, was quite clunky and ugly.
I was lucky to live in times of the internet and online communities.
Looking at what other people were doing; I realized that I had a lot to learn,
but most importantly, I saw that other people had started out like me 
and had evolved their abilities over time.

Where school had done it's best to make learning seem like stupendous work 
for unclear motives and deprive me of any motivation to make an effort towards this.
The world of arts and design suddenly gave me inspiration, will and enthusiasm 
to learn and create; to grow my skillset and dedicate time to a learning process.
The online community put me in contact with like-minded people and professionals
and opened the door to resources, discussion, tipps and constructive critique.

I didn't had anyone telling me what to do, though; noone checking on my work-ethic;
noone demanding results and noone cheering me up when I failed,
or when I lacked motivation. I had to do this myself.
As my projects became more ambitious, they required time and discipline.
Or, in other words: They required me to overcome my own comfort and lazyness.
This teached me to be my own coach. To set up my own goals and follow trough on them.

Seeing this flourish into actual results liberated me.
Getting the first compliments and "well done!"- comments on my work, 
probably marks a turning point of my life..
This was the proof that my effort was worth it; 
the proof that something great could come from it.
It made me trust in myself and fostered a love for my own productivity.
Creating, became a part of my identity, a part I was proud of.
It gave me a steady flow of self-assurance, 
with every new piece that came out better than the last one.
Instead of looking for someone telling me what to do,
I proved that I could find resources and teach myself complex skills.
I was assured to trust my own intuition; to walk my own pathway
and aspire to work, learn and live as I wanted.

After months of learning and some well received self-made things,
I eventually joined a team and worked on a real game project.
I was sixteen, it was a hobby-project of like-minded people, 
scattered over the globe, but connected by the internet.
To me, this was a perfect learning environment and an invaluable experience.
I needed to manage my time, I needed to keep in touch with people, 
I needed to gather critique and process it constructively.

In the project, we thanked each other for the contributions that everyone made. 
We depended on each other, but since there was no money involved,
the only way to get each other engaged was gratitude, constructive dialogue and positivity.
For the first time, I was valued for my expertise; an expertise that I had built on my own.
Now, I experienced the rush of productivity, that a dedicated group could unlock.
How finding a cause for my project, acted like a lever on my motivation.

This world of mine kept me quite busy, while in "real life", my last year of school started.
Even though I was mostly looking out of the window, or drawing into workbooks,
I eventually made it trough my 12 years sentence of german education system.
They gave me a piece of paper with decently pretty numbers and I was free!
Since I didn't had a clue what to do and my grand-dad had left me a financial starter-kit.
I decided to travel trough Japan for a year. Mostly..  because it sounded cool in my own ears. 
This meant to go away from level design, since my trusty desktop computer 
was definetly too fat to come along.

But by now, I had developed a need for a creative outlet.
Playing only a side role before, drawing and painting now took the focus.
I had marvelled at the work of fantasy illustrators and concept artists before and
was inspired and eager to try myself at this craft. 
Soon, I found myself devouring educational videos and articles by professionals of the field. 
Especially the video lessons by Feng Zhu and the articles of Muddy Colors, 
a community of fantasy arts professionals.

Listening to the voices of these far more experienced people,
I noticed that there was a common baseline in their education; 
a common philosophy of the working artist: The philosophy of mastership. 
While listening to professional artists, I didn't learn how to draw a straight line.
More essentially, I learned that their way to their abilities had been one of dedication.
So for the next years, I kept a sketchbook close to me 
and tried to follow their guidance.

In Japan, I ended up working on organic farms and doing landscaping.
I travelled on to New Zealand, worked with a stonemason and discovered hitchhiking there.
From humble beginnings, travels and hitchhiking became another constant of my live.
I find it fascinating to meet people from all walks of life and discover their stories.
Living an independent live and changing places a lot over the last years,
gave me a huge number of learning opportunities.
I worked in construction, gardening, farming, a few different crafts,
in hostels, restaurants, yoga retreats, café's and kindergardens.
//(One being an actual and wonderful kindergarden in the polish countryside,
the other being an illegal german rave-cave named "kindergarden".)
However, I never lost sight of drawing and a lot of calm hours were spent pen-to-paper.
My list of inspirations steadily grew, as I got to dabble in more creative fields.
Be it photography, dance, sculpture, cooking, writing, music or theatre -
I was keen to broaden my horizon and get to know more creative mediums.

Starting to dance, brought a new dynamic to the poses of my characters.
Working in construction, gave me a deeper understanding of architecture;
knowing how things were put together, made it easier to imagine them in a drawing.
Trough this, I found that being a great artist was not only about practicing how to draw.
It was also about the depth of understanding over the subject matter.
Knowing how to work metal; how clothes are sewn; how electric systems work;
all these bits of knowledge support my ability to envision and think conceptual.
Each experience i made, widened my toolset of imagination 
and once again make me see things in a new light.

To me, the most important experience from all these. Is to live life as a human;
To struggle with relationships, experience emotions and friendship and belonging.
Getting to terms with oneself,  facing conflicts, being stressed by financial matters 
and eating ice cream. All this matters and it shapes every line and every word I do.
Being an art apprentice, foremost tought me to pay attention;
to walk away with new insight and knowledge from every situation;
To appreciate every nook and cranny of reality; To be curious and grateful.
This mindset hasn't just made me a better artist,
it made me who I am.

To this day, while my drawing and painting has steadily evolved, I'm still an apprentice.
I haven't found a job as an illustrator, nor as a concept artist
- because, honestly - I'm not there yet.
There are works that I'm proud of, but they represent stations on my learning curve. 
Not a consistent body of work.

What motivated me to write this text, was that I wanted to show, how little that matters.
If all my hard-drives and drawings be piled and burned for heresy 
or stolen by time-travelling vikings..  it wouldn't matter much. 
It might very well be, that I'll never become an acclaimed artist. That's fine.
What I wanted to tell you and myself in this text, 
is how the path to becoming an artist has shaped me.
How much invaluable understanding, insight, resilence and joy it gave me.
Dedicating myself to creative work has made me a better person.

I believe, that every form of creative expression has the potential to unlock this chain reaction; 
be it drawing or dance or blacksmithing or bee-keeping.
That is, why I want to live in a world, where everyone is aspiring to master an art or craft;
where it is common knowledge, that the creative process is essential for personal development.
I want to live in a world full of curious people, who see with open eyes, 
who care about and appreciate their surroundings.
A world of people, who have discovered their potential, who curate their own growth, 
develop their own voice, find their places, experiment with their identity, 
appreciate small things and teach for the passion of sharing knowledge.

When we, as a society, define artists by their artworks, we put the product before the person.
When we set peoples identity equal, with the services and products they offer; with their way of income
then we ignore the complexity, a persons life can and should have;
we ignore how much good can come from diverse interest;
we fail to encourage everyone, to discover their creative potential.
What we do instead, is make it seem, like creative work is superficial 
and reserved for the odd dreamers.

It is not. 
Creativity is essentially human and starting to build an own passion,
marks a step towards a fulfilled life. 
A life that enriches this world.

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Thanks for reading,
If you have something to say, I welcome your words here:
marv.notab@outlook.com
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(c)2018, marvmarv
all rights reserved