When I first stepped into the engineering world, I felt a sense of relief, knowing that art would no longer be my livelihood meant that I was, for the first time in my adult life, going to be able to engage with art intimately, draw whatever the fuck I wanted to draw whenever the fuck however the fuck. There was a little problem, I now had what the kids call a nine-to-five, which in my case was an eight to seven considering commuting, and that I was working far too distant from the city to even consider going back home during my two hour break.
I would get home, some days more tired than others, and I would start watching some show, or play some video game, and by the time the clock neared towards midnight… oh damn! no time to draw.
Learning How to Draw Again
I knew that I had to make some adjustments to my life. The simplest one was to get a tablet that I could use to draw while in the office, a little hobby that I could do while hanging out with my coworkers during our lunch break and any other dead time I had. Simplest way to give myself ninety minutes or even two hours a day to draw.
By this point I was already becoming proud of myself for the way my anatomy was improving, I was doing more dynamic poses, I was toying with expressions. For reference this was 2022, so you can look at my art from around there. I was getting ambitious with my poses, but I was also figuring out how to give myself the time to draw in between having a job, new friends, and responsibilities.
So this led me to doing a lot of unpolished sketches, which was wonderful, because I wasn’t tying myself to a pipeline, I wasn’t restraining my creativity to following a process from start to finish, I could finish whenever I wanted, and when I wanted to finish usually meant that I accomplished whatever growth I wanted to get out of any given sketch. If I wanted to draw a specific expression, I had little point to work on the sketch any further than what was already accomplished.
I entered a cycle of constant improvement. I would find a pose, usually from Football Instagram or my Football Discord server. This was and is great, because unlike picking screenshots from Chris Pratt, Evans, Hemsworth, whatever-pretty-face-marvel-actor, I was drawing genuine emotion, because I can’t think of anything more raw than the anger you feel when you lose a World Cup, the excitement, the tears, they are all emotions taken to the extreme on men who are average looking and diverse. I legit don’t think there is a better way to study facial expressions or body language.
When Culture Started to Feel Empty
At the time I was trying to fit into a local queer community, and thank god I did, because in retrospective that was the best waste of my time EVER. We would hang out for dinner, or take small trips to other cities to do shopping, you know, gay stuff!
After some hangouts I noticed a pattern. Every time one of us would’ve finished a TV show or a movie and would be talking about it, encouraging each other to watch it, and then, a couple nights later we would reaffirm each other that we shared the same emotions through and through when watching the recommended media. Sometimes I would even spend the night at one of their houses watching TV with them.
And all of these people had the vocabulary, knowledge, and trivia to talk about performances, stories, etc. And for a time I thought to myself, how nice is it to have cultured friends.
That was until we went to a museum, then another, then another. I noticed a pattern. Even from the fellow artists in the group, the commentary was meaningless. “Oh wow, look at how this artist drew a chandelier” “ohmhmm appreciate the perspective on this house” “hmmm did you know that \*leans closer to read the artist bio on the print before the exhibit\* this artist had a Scandinavian mother? Scandalous!”
It felt performative. It was just trying to sound cultured, but the remarks had nothing to them, it was meaningless commentary.
At nights when watching TV, I noticed it was just having Netflix play whatever recommended show, dubbed, whilst browsing their, at the time, Twitter timeline. Then talking the next day about their recollection from the stream.
Conversations revolving around media began to feel shallow. Media began to feel pointless. I began to question my interest in hearing word by word your recollection of a story you didn’t even commit to watch undistracted? Perhaps the story didn’t demand attention. Why? Why is this the trend with media, to just exist, to not expect you to engage, to not ask deep questions and, if so, give you a shallow answer?
I didn’t get it. I just felt like TV was becoming a futile hobby. Videogames began to feel less like an art form, more like a skinner box that would reward me with pre-rendered cinematics made by some outsourced studio rather than something I could experience while in control.
Videogame-movies, as in 8 to 10 hour YouTube compilations, began to become popular, and I began to question how much value the videogame could have as an art form if it can be presented as a transformed medium than the medium it was delivered as.
Then I began to question how healthy was it for me as a consumer to engage with the medium “just because” I wanted to know the story. Was I respecting videogames as an art form if I was just consuming the video aspect of them? Shouldn’t the complete packaged experience be the artistic value?
Everyone talked capitalism this, capitalism that. If game sucks capitalism ruined it, if game succeeds then capitalism is not credited for it, the full credit goes entirely on the artists working on it.
Because of my job, at the time in Energy, I was beginning to get used to moving large amounts of money daily, on the seven to eight digits, so naturally I was beginning to question where to draw the line between how much credit the artists behind the project deserve and how much of that success was because of money.
It seemed like there was a correlation between expensive-successful games and target audience analysis, and that correlation became more and more apparent in movies, anime, everywhere.
I began to question what do I truly enjoy in art, because feeling like an ontologically sorted individual to a corporation felt dirty. I don’t want to enjoy this movie just because it is gay and I’m gay. I don’t want to buy this game because I’m gay and it has a gay romanceable option even though the romanceable guy is super not my type.
There has to be MORE!!!
A Film That Actually Let Me Feel
At the time I watched a French film with an online friend, a film called I Am Jonas. I actually didn't remember the film name, I had to look it up, locally I had saved some photos of the lead actor because he's…hot.
It was the story of a gay man who keeps track of a guy and just follows him around discreetly. Sometimes the other guy notices, others don’t. Turns out the protagonist had a crush/relationship with the other man’s older brother who disappeared after they tried to enter a gay bar at the age of 15. His way of grieving was to just stare from the distance at his brother as a way to stay close to the memory and try to reconnect with the family to find some form of closure.
Not the best story ever. Probably most of you haven’t seen it, and those who may have probably, similar to me, don’t remember the title.
But it stuck with me, because it was intimate, it was raw, it wasn’t trying to present a cheerful positive coming of age, or love wins. It felt like something someone who needs therapy would do.
If you’re thinking “ah, so you think for queer media to be valid there needs to be trauma and tragedy”, no, that’s such a simplistic way to view the situation. It was a cultural exchange. It was grieving. It was a broken man. It was emotion. It was the guilty voyeuristic experience of watching a str8 guy in the gym.
It was me being able to engage with a film that wasn’t holding my hand and telling me how to feel. I allowed myself to experience what I wanted.
And the best part is because nobody had seen this film, they were my thoughts, that I kept for myself, MINE.
This had a lot of value to me.