Shading

I have been dipping into The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron again. I am unlikely to undertake the whole week-by-week thing because I am committed to a few other projects that take time, and I have a talent for deciding I’m going to do everything, and then doing two weeks of overkill followed by precisely nothing.

There is an exercise in week 1 that is always worth revisiting, especially if you are me, about identifying your creative monster hall of fame. These are stories from the past where people have behaved like wankers, resulting in damage to your creativity. I could fill an entire blog just writing about my own catalogue of arseholes, but I’ll stick with one for today.

When I was much younger than I am today, I was embarking on a foray into Being An Artist via a college course. My mother bought me a set of profession quality soft pastels that were expensive, beautiful, and I loved them. I discovered that I really had an affinity with the medium, and actually liked the things I created with them. I took care of them, and they gave me great joy when I held the box, opened it, and there they were in their foam rows, each with an individual little space to live in, seperate from their neighbours. They were one of my favourite supplies.

During this period I made the mistake of falling head over heels in love with a most beautiful man-boy on my course (we were late teens). In the end he broke my heart, but before he did that, he borrowed my beautiful box of pastels because he didn’t have any of his own. I was such a people-pleaser that I let him take them. He kept them for ages, and this affected my ability to complete certain class projects. Eventually, he returned them. If memory serves, this was part of the Breaking Up Ritual where we returned things to each other. If memory serves, the punk jumper I returned to him was in precisely the same condition as when I borrowed it. You can guess where this is going next.

The pastels came back to me in a torn box, with the inserts discarded somewhere so they were all in a jumbled, dusty mess. They were broken, wrappers were torn, or missing, and all the colours rubbing together had coated them all in a kind of manky grey dust. It felt really shitty that he had done that.

I never used them again. If I opened the box, even years later, I just felt shitty and closed it again. If I used pastels, I used new boxes of cheaper pastels, but I wasn’t really making art for a long time, for a variety of reasons. I kept them though, I never considered getting rid of them.

I’ve been getting back into making art again recently, and I have hauled out almost every art supply I own as part of the process. I confess that I may have added quite a few new ones to the stash because *cough*. The pastels have sat on my recently installed shelves, just sort of sitting there.

Yesterday I opened the box, and the same disappointment and shitty feeling appeared, but this time I decided that I really want to use them. I started to dust them off, and gave a few a try, and they seem to still be usable despite being thirty years old. So, I have ordrered some empty boxes with foam inserts to give them a new home, and maybe the new boxes where they are all properly cared for will change my relationship with them.

There’s a 100 Days creative project going on that I may, or may not, participate in. I’ll start it today with the best of intentions, and my pastels.