I don’t really know much about what I want from this challenge yet just so as to say that there was a part of my life when I felt really connected to visual art. I used to draw all the time, I used to think about ideas for paintings and dream of illustrating children’s books and graphic novels.
A part of me is still excited by those things but for whatever reason, maybe it was going to a school without passionate artists, maybe it was pushing myself to be more logical and working in logical STEM fields for years, or maybe it was just a part of growing up – I lost touch with art somewhere along the way.
The challenge is simple but difficult to define. I will have succeeded if I feel that I am meeting my need to be creative and finding that joy, wonder, and creativity in my life again like I did when I was younger.
I will try to express the feelings through a poem:
Anything Was Possible
Anything was possible back then
And by anything I don’t mean that I ever dreamed of anything as boring as a seven-figure salery
I felt the worlds of magic at my fingertips
The rush and pull of sorcery
A great clash between good and evil
And a bond between friends, unwavering
Of great courage and great sacrifice
I think now
In what my younger self could have only described
As old age
30 years old is practically ancient
I know that the only way I can do this challenge
Is not through an arbitrary goal or metric
But rather it has to be a portal to another world
A graphic novel
Like I always wanted
Or an illustrated book
It doesn’t matter
Because it is the world that matters
The world that I can escape to
Like the little mouse hole my six year old self would crawl into
To read frog and toad books at the library
Perhaps this has all come full circle after all
Because 30 years old is precisely the age
My younger self would expect to be the time
When people stopped being readers
And started being writers
The creators of the worlds
Like the ones I used to like to escape to
When I was young
It’s actually both fantastic and sad that it took a poem for me to understand what my focus will be for my art challenge. I think I will rename this challenge. I wanted to find myself reinspired by art, and I forget how art inspired me in the first place – by entering and creating other worlds.
This will now be known as the “The Other World” challenge and I will dedicate a year to it.
One year to develop another world that I can dive into, be comforted by, and be lost in.
That means by October 9th, 2024 I will endeavor to have created a miracle. Shaped and molded a whole new universe out of words, images, and maybe even music.
I’m excited because I thought this challenge was going to be like the rest of them, so difficult and challenging. I thought it was going to be about doing Inktober and drawing for an art competition. I realize now that those goals are meaningless to me, and using them as goals, made me feel directionless in art.
This feels more true to my love for art. I remember crying to my girlfriend today about a beautiful book I read when I was young, called the Power of Un. It was a world that I fell into, just like all the others. It was all these worlds that made me feel excited for life. And it is the absence of these worlds that have left me feeling like some part of me was lost and never quite found.