On Productivity

“Life happened.”

This is something I frequently say, to both myself and others, when trying to explain away a long gap in either sharing my art or making art at all. It’s a half-assed and largely meaningless excuse I make when I just haven’t felt like doing anything.

I mean, life does happen. Life is literally always happening. Sometimes my life doesn’t include art, though, and maybe that’s why I remain the hobbyist that I’ve always been: the lack of that constant need or desire to create.

My energy comes and goes. Mental illness ebbs and flows. In the year that I’ve created this site, well, life happened. Day-to-day, month-to-month. Depression swells and is released, anxiety is omnipresent and is bolstered as my ability to cope with the chemical slush swishing around in my head is pressed to its limits (and it is in this same year that I’ve realized how calamitously paltry those limits are).

I’m not going to go into the more explicit details of what’s passed in the last year or so. It’s the usual. All of it though has affected what I have and have not done creatively. I’ve managed to recognize certain patterns (thanks, therapy!) that tend to get things in motion: depression causes rut, anxiety causes frantic and dire bursts. As I get older and approach mid-life, I tend to fall prey to those insecurities that can accompany it: my lack of focus, my lack of accomplishment, my lack of life truly lived. All of that gets into a cartoonish rumble-tornado and forces me into brief spats of furious activity that rarely result in anything worthwhile. This leads to lulls, to bouts of depression. It can take a while to crawl out of these, and sometimes hobbies can help: in October, I was able to become more myself again by quietly working on Gunpla kits. They were calming, relaxing, therapeutic and felt free of the angst that drawing can sometimes carry along with it.

I am at my best- my most productive- when life is boring. When I’m in that pleasant middle-space I can get to when I feel secure in my job and my finances and my health. Stability induces fecundity, all that. So sometimes working on other shit can tide me over until I get back to a place where I feel more comfortable and in turn more willing to paint.

I had gone several months without even touching this site. It continued its monthly withdrawals from my banking account for its right to exist. Yesterday I felt that mania again- this time, compounded by the impending financial dread this year holds (one of which, my forthcoming wedding, I am happy to let drain me, while the looming and very necessary dental work is far less welcome) and I logged in, started looking around, starting getting that urge to just fucking do shit.

How long with this last? Who knows. If I’m good at one thing it’s slowly compiling a body of work while feeling as though I am accomplishing nothing. If I take a look at my life as one tries to when things feel bad, though, I have that Jimmy Stewart “It’s A Wonderful Life” moment where I can see what I’ve done. I have a job, I have a roof over my head. I have a fiance that I love and a few friends. And hey, while I may not be a professional artist, I have something to show for the hobby that’s been with me since I was a small child. I have work. I have a physical approximation of the colors and the shapes that are constantly churning about in my head.

That’s not too bad.