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It seems a funny thing to observe that I miss having a blog (the kind I update daily with random stuff, not a place like this, which is more narrow in focus)… not because I love Too Much Sharing, but because writing my thoughts down forced me to organize them, and walked me through them to conclusions I might not have otherwise.

In that spirit, then, this is a ‘blog post’, about painting.

Like most readers who got serious about science fiction and fantasy in the ‘80s, I was in love with Michael Whelan’s paintings… and inevitably, as an artist who also told stories, I wanted to be able to depict the stories in my head that believably. How splendid it would be to be able to paint something that made the stuff that existed solely in my imagination look like reality! How could I not want book covers like that? And by extension, how could I not want that level of skill?

But time went by, and I didn’t paint like that, and I continued not to paint like that. I went through art school, where the professors refused to teach anyone to paint like the Old Masters and thought, “That’s obviously the problem… I can’t find anyone to teach me!” And continued on my merry way, doing what I was doing, which was some weirdo fusion of things that never really satisfied me because it wasn’t real enough and that’s what I wanted, right? To paint things that could be mistaken for reality.

My art advisor, throughout this process, did a lot of eye rolling. I remember the day we were sitting at a table outside the university bookstore, and I was complaining about this (yet again, years after I’d graduated). He said: “You have the skill to paint like that. You don’t need a teacher, you just need to read how the Old Masters did it and then put in the time. But you won’t put in the time, and it’s not because you’re lazy. You find time for everything you want to do. The problem isn’t that you don’t know how to paint like a realist, it’s that you don’t want to paint like a realist.”

To which I said something excuse-y like “I’d have to take time away from other things that are more pressing though! And I don’t know how I’d monetize it. And I don’t have a place to paint with the media that make it possible to paint like that.” Etcetera, etcetera, and totally ignoring that he was right then, and he’s still right. All those excuses are me rationalizing something I don’t want to do. The real question, then, is why?

This was not, admittedly, a priority question for me. Writing makes most of my money; when art makes money, it’s in chunks when I sell an original, which doesn’t happen often (maybe because I don't try. More eye rolling from art advisor here). While the “I don’t know how to monetize it” excuse is an excuse, it’s also a real problem that would need solving before I could tell myself it’s a good idea to suck time and attention away from writing. But putting together the exhibit for my alma mater shook loose a lot of stuff in my head. The first and most obvious was that every story I told with each ‘cluster’ I put up was just that: a story intertwined with art. I used art to tell those students about my storytelling efforts… and my writing was so wrapped around with the art that I had lots and lots of choices to use to illustrate my points.

So, first admission, which I needed to smack myself with: even if I can’t monetize my art directly, doing art feeds my writing process. Even if I never sold another sketch, those sketches are paid for by the novels I write while doodling them, or thinking plot points through by drawing them. And my writing is poorer for any attempt to cut the art out of that process. Just looking at those walls made me shake my head. How could I have ever believed that I can have one without the other? This is how I think. As a writer, I think visually; as an artist, I think narratively. Those contradictions would seem to point to a truth: art and writing in me are not separate things, but manifestations of a single way of grappling with reality.

Derp. As I admitted myself while on stage, you never stop figuring things out.

I called that an ‘admission’ because these aren’t realizations. Realizing implies that you’ve observed and understood something. Admission implies that, in this case, you’re willing to confess to having realized something. Because as we all know, humans are excellent at realizing stuff and then immediately denying it, or looking away, or explaining things so that they don’t have to face whatever that realization means about themselves or what they have to do.

Moving on to the second admission then, which came as a weird byproduct of several students asking me how to find their artistic style, or creative/writing voice. I blithely responded to this (multiple times!) by saying that you discover your style/voice by copying things you like, combining them with other things you like, and combining those things with your personal observations of reality, until the mash-up is a unique and accurate reflection of you. Even my daughter, who is in the “I’m going to copy cute cartoons by other people I like” stage of learning to draw, asked me how to develop her own style and I said all that stuff again.

All that was percolating in my head, then, when I was working on the Heartskein cover. I usually enjoy painting, but this one wasn’t as much fun as usual because I was pushing myself in multiple ways: it was larger than I’m used to; it had a more challenging color scheme than I usually try; and it was created using tools I’d resigned myself to, because the paper I love is basically gone and never coming back. I was also vaguely distressed because I was producing another book cover and I was (again) thinking ‘this isn’t the hyper-realistic style that I associate with good fantasy/science fiction book covers.’ But I was working on it, and I’d gotten to the point where I’d decided that I needed to fix the printed out lines… which were gray, of course, because I wanted to be able to paint over them. There was no transforming those lines into realistic edges, not with this paper, this media, or even this particular drawing. So I started tracing them in yellow, boldly, and I muttered as I did, “Just lean into this illustrative thing. Lean into it.”

So I did that, and painted all these stark outlines, and sat back and looked at it and boom! My brain exploded. I finally saw all the mish-mash stuff that had led to my voice. And it wasn’t the hyper-realism of the Michael Whelans, Michelangelos, and great masters of the past. It was Art Nouveau meeting Art Deco head-on, with a hefty sprinkling of Jody Lee. Whose book covers I’d also long admired, but whom I’d never consciously tried to paint like.

Admission #2 time. And it's harsh. My art advisor had been right all along: I never wanted to paint like those people. The same thing had happened to me that had happened to me in writing… I’d been told that realism was better than illustrative styles. I’d been told that illustrative styles were less adult. I’d been told that science fiction and fantasy were juvenile, and that only realistic depictions of subjects like that could—just barely—squeak past as worthy of attention, because at least they demonstrated great skill. I had bought into this idea that in order for people to take me seriously, and take the things I cared about seriously, I had to do things in this particular way. This way and no other. Anything else was Less Than The Best.

Do I still admire that style of painting? Absolutely. I love those works. But loving them doesn’t mean I have to slavishly copy them. And it doesn’t mean that the way I do things is invalid, or that I should give it up.

*facepalm*

How much of my reluctance to work on my art in the past decade or so has been secretly fueled by embarrassment that I’m not ‘good enough’ when I was using someone else’s measuring stick? A lot, I bet. The internet only makes it easier to beat yourself with that stick: throw a rock and you’ll hit a couple of hundred amazing artists online who are younger than you and draw better than you do (using a hyper-realist style, even!). It was better to think ‘I’m just a doodler who sometimes finishes stuff that I’m using as a substitute for hiring someone with real chops’ than it was to face years of internalized assumptions about how a ‘good’ science fiction and fantasy artist draws.

It really burns me up to think that I’d basically accepted, at a subconscious level, the sneering critiques I got in college from snobby graduate student teachers about my ‘cartoons’ and how I should ‘stop drawing thundercats.’ They’d love knowing what they did to me. (Until I told them how much my latest painting sold for. That would probably shut them up.)

I frequently say that in order to be productive, you have to identify the things that are stopping you. Sometimes those things are easy to identify (“I don’t have a surface to draw on.” “My wrists hurt when I use colored pencils.”). Sometimes those things are deeply buried… or not so deeply buried, but so wound up with expectations and assumptions that you don’t want to touch them, like this was for me. But I’ve seen it now, and more importantly I’ve faced it, looked it in the eye, and said ‘this is stupid.’

What does that mean? I don’t know yet. I do know that I feel weirdly freer. Weirdly because that free feeling isn’t necessarily connected to anything but a nebulous future… and weird because I feel like I can do things I didn’t want to do in the past that might have associated me with those hyper-realistic painters. For one thing, a lot of illustrators are really good at accurately observing and depicting reality. (In layman’s terms: they are good at drawing believably real things). That ability informs their art, but it doesn’t dominate it. It’s all right for me to get better and better at drafting without getting better and better at being another Michael Whelan. Your decisions about how to use your skill at realistic drawing in a piece of art are just that: decisions. They aren’t fate.

The Heartskein cover is done, and I’ve handed it off to the art photographer because it’s too large for my stitching software to handle when I try to scan it. People think it’s one of the loveliest pieces I’ve done in a long time. For once, rather than squirming or thinking about its many flaws, I feel I agree with them. Because it’s the first piece of art I’ve made—maybe in my adult life—that I spent any time in its creation being true to what I think is pretty, rather than what I think other people want. It has a wholeness to it, because of that.

I want to think about that a while, and see what happens next.

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Comments

filkferengi

So, Vasiht'h is not the only one having important revelations/realizations about self-constraint and personal power? Bravo & kudos to you both! --filkferengi

Anonymous

I love this blog post! Thank you. *beaming*

Anonymous

YES--doodling/sketching is one way you story-think, and creating the art helps you understand the story: I TOTALLY get this and totally see it in you. And I also was smiling at the art professor's saying "you find the time for the things you want to do," because it's something I remind myself of: that if I say I love something, but I always give priority to some other thing... that's telling me something. (I'm talking about when you have the freedom to choose among liked things, not about when you're forced to do something by an exigency. I may have to put earning money above any number of free-time things, but in my free time what I choose tells me something, you know?) And illustrative art is *so* beautiful and so valid--i'm really glad you had that final realization, and your cover looks beautifully, completely at home in this grouping.

Anonymous

<3 <3 <3

Anonymous

This is exactly it. Well done!

Anonymous (edited)

Comment edits

2023-02-11 22:07:52 I'm way behind on actually scrolling through my creators' content on Patreon and this post is so wonderful and full and I hope it speaks to many artists the way it spoke to me--especially artist/writers. Your thought about how your art informs and supports your writing...I know this feeling! It's validating to see someone embracing what they love in art and leaning into their own beautiful style. This painting is, truly, one of my favorites, and I love seeing all the Why behind it. <3
2020-03-22 18:50:42 I'm way behind on actually scrolling through my creators' content on Patreon and this post is so wonderful and full and I hope it speaks to many artists the way it spoke to me--especially artist/writers. Your thought about how your art informs and supports your writing...I know this feeling! It's validating to see someone embracing what they love in art and leaning into their own beautiful style. This painting is, truly, one of my favorites, and I love seeing all the Why behind it. <3

I'm way behind on actually scrolling through my creators' content on Patreon and this post is so wonderful and full and I hope it speaks to many artists the way it spoke to me--especially artist/writers. Your thought about how your art informs and supports your writing...I know this feeling! It's validating to see someone embracing what they love in art and leaning into their own beautiful style. This painting is, truly, one of my favorites, and I love seeing all the Why behind it. <3

SheltieMum

I keep looking at this cover especially because it epitomizes the depth of love Jahir and Vasiht’h share, the crucible that shaped them, and the infinitely precious and fragile future they’ve embraced. Thank you!