How do I make art with no expectations?

Post date: 2021-08-02 17:06:14

I feel that I have no right to make art because I didn't go to art school and am just a amateur dabbler with delusions of grandeur who would look foolish to others.

Background to this: I enjoyed art in high school and the art teacher who was well-known for being cranky and stern to students liked me. However, I also knew a girl one year my senior who was indisputably very talented (the whole school knew her) and the art teacher's favorite. This girl would later go to art school and end up winning a prestigious national prize when she graduated.

I felt that I wasn't obviously talented as she was and when the time to make a decision came, I chose not to take art. Moreover, my working-class Asian parents would definitely not have allowed me to go to art school because they felt that artists and musicians are bums who end up starving on the streets. My childhood dream was to be an English professor/novelist and art was more of a side passion. I went on to university as planned and then I went to grad school but I bombed out of academia due to a combination of lack of financial/family support.

I remain deeply scarred by my failed academic dreams and have been unable to find a fulfilling job that pays me enough ever since. I had invested all of myself into that dream and when that failed, I had nothing left and now, at middle-age, I'm mourning deeply the choices I made when I was younger and the paths I did not take.

I've lost a lot of time and my skills have atrophied. I painted on and off over the years with long breaks in between due to life issues. At one point, someone who saw my work online offered me money to illustrate a children's book he was writing for his daughter but I was unable to take up the project because I was then trapped in a terrible temp job that took up all my energy.I also took recreational classes on and off but that's difficult right now for both financial and Covid-related reasons (I am fully vaccinated but with Delta variant going around, I am just not comfortable with sitting for hours indoors with more than ten people even though classes have resumed).

I'm sort of like a vocation version of Miss Havisham. After investing all my love and identity into my passion, I was left at the altar and I'm afraid of loving anything again.

I know myself too well and I know that I want to be really good and recognized for any serious pursuit. I wish I can have the same relation to art, the way I have with cooking. I'm a competent vegetarian home cook who feeds myself tasty food with pleasure and I have zero desire to become a professional chef. My self-esteem doesn't rest on my cooking skills or what others think of my food.

The itch to paint again is constantly at the back of my mind whenever I see a photo of a beautiful landscape. Lately, I've been obsessed with beautiful cloud formations at sunset. I just yearn to play with colors. But I don't know how to paint for pure pleasure again with the weight of years of expectations, fear and failed dreams oppressing me.

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