What Is The End Point? Don’t Ask Me!

When I was younger, I worried I wasn’t a good artist because I wasn’t the kind of person would carry ideas for artwork around in their brain and then execute them. Some people would, and that idea seemed so foreign to me. In printmaking class, this became particularly evident. Printmaking — linocut, lithography, intaglio, screen printing, etc. is very technical media. Typically (and how you often get taught) one comes up with an image of which you want to make a print. Then you have to execute it. You have to envision what the end product is, get a piece of material (let’s say wood), dig into it such that the negative image of what you want is produced, put ink on it, stick in a press, roll it onto paper, pull the paper out, inspect. And if you want to do multiple colors? You either have to strategically decide how to divide the image into layers, each color representing a layer, then cut each layer into wood. Or, even worse, you had to use the same piece of wood and repeatedly cut more and more into one image. Then you have to cover the thing in ink and run it through the press repeatedly. (If any printmaker reads this, I’m sorry for all of the errors I have made in conveying the process. I’m not good at printmaking. That’s part of the point of this blog post.) This kind of process was really great for people who had an end product in mind and then would execute. It seemed like the way that they developed their skills and creatively experimented was to fiddle with the technical process to figure out how to get what was in their head onto the paper. 

I am not that person. As mentioned before, I have ADHD. That means I am great at simultaneous processing, bad at sequential processing, I have a terrible short-term memory, and a great long-term one. I am great at idea generation, and bad a executing them. Spoiler alert, this will be a theme in this blog. Learning how my brain works and learning how to work with it, not against it, has been a life-long process and will continue to be.

I hate board games with technical rules. My eyes glaze over when someone gives me directions. I want to cry when someone tries to explain how to use a computer program and then makes me execute a task on it. That is to say, I suffered mightily in printmaking class. I would make errors in the process, because I would lose focus. My works were shitty. I tried to come up with an idea that I thought was cool and edgy and then execute it. There were many bad ideas, but one really takes the cake. I drew a silhouette of a dead body floating in the sky like a balloon, with a little girl holding onto the toe tag like the string of a balloon. (Let’s all be glad I didn’t have the drawing skills to make it truly gross. The silhouette element classed it up a bit.) To make it worse, I for some reason chose to use oil in these prints, so they came out all mushy and greasy. They were very bad. They were bad in concept, and the execution was worse. I am not a very morbid person. I don’t like horror movies. I am an optimist. I am positive and goofy and really love when people are doing well. That was my idea of what I thought “edgy” was. This is what happens when I try to be someone I am not. It is very awkward and weird and everyone knows it, including me. I still have those prints, and cringe whenever I look at them.

This all changed when we got to monotype printmaking. Monotype printmaking is the one kind of printmaking that does not allow you to make multiples of the thing you make. For example, in wood block printing, described badly above, you can use that block that you have carved to make as many prints as you want. In monotype printmaking, you spread ink directly onto a piece of glass (or other medium) and press paper onto it either by running it through a press or smushing it with whatever you have on hand (including your hands). The image is then transferred to the paper. You don’t get a second shot. Sometimes, if there is still some ink on the glass, someone will press another piece of paper onto the glass, producing what is called a “ghost print” because the image is like the one on the first print, but much lighter.

I loved monotype printmaking. It allowed me to improvise, and see where my art would take me. I would make abstract shapes in ink, run them through the press, examine the result, and then make another shape in the ink, and run it through the press again. The image would develop as I watched it happen.

It’s funny — when I discovered my affinity for monotypes, I was really returning to earlier sensibilities that I had already developed but realize it. My dad is an abstract photographer, and when I was a kid, he would talk to me about abstraction and what makes an interesting composition. I would make my own abstract art via collage. I like the physical experience of moving elements around and testing out various ways in which they could work together. As a kid, I gravitated towards collage because it removed a central anxiety I felt about art making — that question of choice. How do you decide what mark to make, and why? That felt impossible. There were too many options! When you are working with collage, you are working with marks already made, in the form of one piece of paper you are gluing to another. For a long time, I felt almost guilty that I never got over what seemed like an anxiety about making the first mark — was this a weakness in my artistic sensibility? Was this cowardice? I talked to my therapist about this, and thought for a long time that this might be the case — collage let me avoid my fear.

When I was in that printmaking class, I hadn’t made collages in a long time, and had kind of forgotten what it felt like. However, when I started to work in abstraction via monotype prints felt just like making collages. It wasn’t until that class when I started to think of this way of working as a skill or a sensibility in its own right. Maybe what I previously identified as anxiety or cowardice around making the first mark, and creating something out of of my own head, was just me noticing that I wasn’t working in a way that was in line with my sensibility. Because my brain is not one that is catered to in most areas of the world, I have a lifetime of linking this feeling of misfit to the feeling of anxiety — it is stressful to feel like your brain isn’t doing what others say it should do. That feeling stays with you, and can come up in a lot of places.

Working in line with my brain and my sensibilities brings me so much joy and interest, and abstraction lets me do this. Working without an end product in mind makes the whole process exciting. The whole process is ideation. I don’t have to get through a bunch of boring, procedural stuff to get to something interest. Courtesy of ADHD, my brain runs on intellectual interest. So, when I have to do a boring thing to eventually get to an end product, I lose focus. That’s why I made mistakes when doing woodblocks with multiple steps, and why I can’t follow verbal directions. It’s just not interesting so my brain doesn’t produce the dopamine needed to stay engaged. 

However, with my way of making art, I have developed a process that allows me to stay interested the whole time — I am constantly examining my media, I am constantly reflecting on what I am seeing and feeling, and thinking of ways to craft a composition. Abstract art feels improvisational and experimental to me. It’s all about balance and tension among compositional elements. I am not saying that representational art also doesn’t engage these elements, but these elements are isolated in abstract art in a way I find interesting. Like in the scientific method, you have to isolate a variable to manipulate it and understand it — if you move too many variables at once, you don’t get good information, and you don’t know what is going on. For me, I like to think deeply about how one builds a strong composition. How do you know when it is strong? Do you feel it? Does it register emotionally, intellectually, or physically? How can I hone my “eye,” and my capacity to identify a strong composition?

Nowadays, I’m back to collage. Largely, I gravitate to it for convenience. There isn’t a lot of set-up or complicated technical elements that I need to deal with before I get going. I am using my old artwork (Including the spooky balloons - the legs from one of the prints are featured in photo for this blog post), cutting them up, and making new work with them. I like exploring my own capacity for understanding what works visually. I have made a lot of bad art, but I learned things through them — what processes work for me, what shapes build visual tension with one another, etc. I like the feeling of moving through uncertainty. I can start with something ugly, and I am well aware it is ugly, and I just keep moving and working, and adding, and subtracting elements until I find something that clicks visually — sometimes it’s not strictly beautiful, but it has a visual harmony and interest.