Too Much Information on My Childhood Skills as an Artist

My professional aspirations as a  weirdo slightly compulsive child consisted of being an artist; at least until I faced the truth and acknowledged that I possessed none of the necessities to fill this position.  Drawing skills? nope.  Painting skills? nope.  Ability to create a blob of something that slightly resembled art and call it ABSTRACT art? nope.  Ability to create socially appropriate art? nope.

 

I was an odd child.  Case in point: Everyone remembers those plates you made in pre-school, right? Where you would draw on a paper plate and it would be shipped off to a company where they would magically plasticize it and your “ART” would be forever preserved in a high quality dishwasherUNsafe plate, which your parents would keep forever despite the fact that your drawings were wildly inappropriate and embarrassing? Oh… meeithermeeither……

 

 

And this DEFINITELY wasn’t one of mine…

Except… that it appears to have my name clearly written on it.

 

 

Ok. Its mine.

 

At first glance this may to be your un-of-the-mill child drawing.  Until you realize that yes, this is a mermaid, and no, she does NOT have two sets of arms.  Correct, that mermaid has one giant blue RACK. Like needs a reduction.  Hi, my name is Ginny and I enjoyed drawing topless mermaids as a child. A lot.

 

Sadly this led to the demise of my career as an artist.  I became a one trick pony, and soon learned that my one trick was in fact quite shameful.  There went my career.

 

I had forgotten about this ancient artifact until my dad decided that he would have a special place in his kitchen for the ‘Plate of the Month’….wherein he ‘featured’ one of mine or my sister’s ancient plastic plates.  The mermaid plate was the first to hit the rotation.  I took one look at it and could not stop laughing inside.

 

But this story DOES have a point, other than making a mockery of my own shame.  As I have switched my path in life to being an artist, I review my past work and sometimes get the ‘mermaid syndrome’.  Work that at one time I thought was great sometimes makes me cringe when I go back and look at my editing style, use of poor equipment, and lack of sense of any sort of style.  I recently reviewed some of my earliest work on old hard drives, and could not help but feel angry that at one time I used selective color, over-airbrushed skin, and used far too many actions in editing.  But even though my style in every aspect of photography has evolved, I still love those sessions.  The emotions captured were real.  The people in them are beautiful.  And they are a part of my evolution to defining my style.

 

Just like the mermaid plate, which stills is displayed in my dad’s kitchen-I loved making her (boobs and all) and though I one day knew that it wasn’t the best and perhaps something to be embarrassed of, I loved it because it was iconic of an era…an incredibly awkward, learning about the world and all of its anatomically correct mur-people era.