Many will find it weird and absurd, how I’ve been drawing for almost…fifteen years, and I never ever considered art school until lately. I drew every single day in highschool and college, sold some polymer clay art works, did a lot of art for other people and just absolutely loved art, and I never once realized that maybe, just maybe, I could do the work I often admired and envied in other people. With my graduation around the corner, I’ve been forced to do some soul searching–and I realized that I could not ignore that need in me to create things. I’m a pragmatic sort of person. I find the easiest and fastest way to what’s most convenient for me–that’s the way I’ve always been. To say that I was quite horrified to realize that if I was to satisfy that need to create art, I would have to suffer, would be an understatement. There’s this quote from The Alchemist that I really like. I’ve read it long ago, but only lately did this quote ring true for me:
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”
It’s only recently that I understood that all this time, I had been afraid of suffering. Art, in my country, isn’t a popular thing, and no one around me ever thought of encouraging me about it. It was just a hobby to people around me, so it was easy to ignore it, bury it, and blind myself with dreams of a six or seven-figure salary, travel, prestige, and power that would come with the business world I was determined to go into. Truth was, I had been so afraid of suffering that I had ignored the desire to create, buried it deep within, and dismissed it as a ‘hobby’. You can only imagine how I feel when I realized that there was no way my passion for art would lie within me quietly. If you’ve ever felt that all-consuming passion, drive, and burden to create something, you know what I’m talking about.
Anyway, to make the long story short, I’ve recently decided to go down the path I feared the most–following what I really wanted to do: Sell art. I’ve done so quite successfully if I may say so, for the past few months, with polymer clay jewelry, and have been experimenting and discovering many other things. My most recent passion in art is scrapbook paper. What’s not to like about them? They’re pretty, they’re colorful–they’re like a different sort of painting that reflects a person’s real self. How did I get all that from scrapbook paper? Well, simple, really, you pick something based on who you are, and when you pick a particular design of scrapbook paper, it shows people around you who you are–even if you can’t define it yet. Anyway, some say that I’ve satisfied my ‘dalliance’ with art. They’re quite right…and quite wrong at the same time. I find that I had satisfied my desire for art…and that my affair with art has developed into something very strong and very real.
These days, I’m hoping to figure out how to sell my designs one day, and as I made my scrapbook paper designs today, that old fear within me welled up. In the vast sea of artists out there–why would anyone like my art better than the others? The smart thing to do would probably be to get a job and sell art as a side job, but as I’ve started being honest with myself, I might as well be honest and admit that I do not want art to be my ‘side job’. And there’s that fear again. I would’ve given up easily–yes, contrary to popular belief, I actually give up easily, but lately, I feel as though this is the path God wants me to go. That strengthens me. I mean, it’s God who wants me to go there. He gave me the talent, the skill–and he’s backing me up on this. The fear is still there. It never leaves, but somehow, knowing that God is by my side, gives me strength to push on. I find that truly, every second of this journey is a second’s encounter with God.
Oh, and before I forget, here’s what I made today:
