what is "being an artist" anyways

[tenderfeeling]

not actually the question i'm going to posit to myself here -- this entry is a bit of a disorganized musefest so tread with caution for eccentricities of someone who "makes" "things".

i am an "artist". i have made "art" for the past.. i don't know, decade and a half? slightly longer than that? i've taken it "seriously" for... probably 7 years now. not really a long amount of time when you think about it! or maybe it is, depending on how your outlook is -- glass half full/half empty dichotomy.

still.. it's hard to feel like an artist, without the scare quotes. the things i make aren't grand. i don't draw backgrounds, my portraits aren't necessarily lovingly rendered, i don't have the charisma of a comic artist, and despite my love for it in all forms put me in front of anything that makes music and i'm utterly incompetent. that isn't to say i don't think the things i make are art, intellectually. i know they are, and i know there is value to be found there, but i just can't be proud of it.

part of it is knowing i can make something better, and another is being afraid that i can't. i think.. i was a bad artist for a very long time, and that was very easy to accept - after all, if you're Bad at something, you can get Good at it, right? but nobody talks about being mediocre.
i wouldn't say being mediocre is necessarily an inbetween of "good" and "bad", but moreso.. something you can become regardless of your skill level. worse, mediocrity feels extremely hard to break out of. is it? i don't know. i wouldn't know -- i haven't yet. i'm sure someone better at words than me would be able to explain the phenomenon better (there's the self-doubt again. you've been at university reading level since you were how young again?) (yes, but that doesn't mean i'm good at writing the words that i read back), but to someone with a sensory mind like me, the easiest way i find to explain it is that i feel like i am stuck in a mud track between two grassy hills. i'm walking, and i can tell when i've moved a meter or two, and those are always very good amounts of progress that i am proud of, but i'm still in the mud track. i'm still covered in mud, and when someone hands me something to do, it's gonna be fuckin' muddy.

i think, part of it is that i feel like i'm not giving anything to anyone. i'm not giving anyone an experience with the things i make. i don't feel like people come back to my things to look at them again and again because it makes them feel something. i didn't make them think, i didn't help them, i didn't do anything to challenge them. all i did was give them a pretty picture to gloss over, like the millions of trillions of pretty pictures there are on the internet.

is there a conclusion to this? no, not really. i still don't know what it all means, or what i want. but i'm trying to figure it out. i'm sure most creatives are as confused as me, and i'm sure people i regard as artists would regard themselves as "artists". is "art" not art anyways? who decides if something makes people feel something? is it just feedback that i need? i don't know!

but let's keep creating "art". maybe one day we'll make something we can think of as art.