Penciling In the Past: Reviving an Old Hobby
When I was in preschool, I refused to do art projects. When our teacher asked us to draw something, I wandered over to the bookshelf, choosing to flip through the pictures rather than create one myself. Perhaps I had already compared my squiggles to the images in the board books and decided it wasn’t worth it, or maybe I already sensed a connection to the words — whatever the reason, it took me until elementary school to start creating my own art.
Within weeks, art became my favorite class — I would carry a notebook around to draw and write in, and I would mimic the images I saw in the books I read. But as I entered middle school, art became my most time-consuming class, even as I enjoyed it. I would complete my other homework and spend hours every night trying to perfect my work, longing to create finished products comparable to the work of those years above me. By the time high school began, art class brought me more stress than joy because I always wanted to create something better than the end result. I was challenging myself to strive for perfection rather than excellence, so I always fell short of my expectations, creating pieces that I thought were “nice enough but needed improvement,” or “looked decent if you ignored the hands.” My junior and senior year of high school, I decided not to take any art classes at all, deciding that my time was better spent on other interests.
But over winter break, the words of one of my art teachers came back to me: “there’s no such thing as a mistake in art.” I had brushed off the words back in grade school, telling myself that they were well-intentioned but inaccurate, yet now I see the merit in what she said. When comparing her words to the concepts that “art imitates life” and, as Oscar Wilde said, “life imitates art,” the freedom to make mistakes is a comfort that becomes part of the art itself.
I decided to reintegrate visual art into my life this year by setting a personal goal of drawing something every day, penciling in time for this pastime of my past. Some days I draw for ten minutes, doing a quick sketch of a figure or face, but most days I’m spending thirty minutes to an hour with my sketchbook. And with this new outlook on drawing, the moment that I pull out my sketchbook is becoming one of my favorite times of the day.
Yet with my new habit comes a new drawing ritual: I only draw in pen so I can’t erase my lines. Like actions in life, everything I draw is permanent, and it is up to my imagination to twist what feel like mistakes into new ideas.