The Art of Letting Art Go
The concept of “letting go” is something with which I’ve always had a mixed-up relationship.
Some things are so easy for me to drop, I’ve forgotten I ever even had them, like pennies I found on the sidewalk and $120k college degrees. Some things are only gone from me with claw marks still embedded in them, like old loves and favorite books and the music I’ve listened to since 2004.
What can I say? I have a dysregulated attachment style. Thankfully, art helps. I mean, look at this tree. It’s diseased, rotting from the inside out. Should we let it decay, or plant something new?
Planting something new sounds good to me, because I am an extremely prolific creator. I create and create and create all the time. I am also deeply impatient and I never spend too much time on a single project. I sit down, I make the thing, and I never look at it again. Even if I lie to myself and say I will keep going tomorrow. I won’t. I know I won’t. You know I won’t. I am already beyond the feeling the project evoked. Why would I need to go over it again and again?
This is a metaphor, obviously, for the debilitating anxiety I am often riddled with in my everyday life. Letting go of the outcome is a lot easier than obsessing over it.
This is rooted in the Buddhist concept of detachment,
which you can Google or meditate on at your leisure.
With this philosophy, I have discovered that I can get up on a stage before a live audience in the theatre. I can teach an art class and not worry about the outcome, even though I made the art in front of 30 new students. I even post “profound” (read: not that deep) videos on a public forum like TikTok, without worrying that it’s my face and voice people would witness.
This is for one simple reason: I’ve decided that if it is MINE, it is good. If it is authentic to my self-expression, it doesn’t need to be technical. Who decides what’s “good” anyway? The audience? Pah! I am the audience. I make art for me. If other people like it, great! If not, well then, I guess I have to just…. let…. that…. go. (See what I did there?)
Another reason I like to use ink for all my drawing and rarely sketch anything out because I need to allow myself to make mistakes. I need to look at what I’ve done and turn it into a choice. Deal with the consequences. Take action to make it a growing experience for my soul, rather than let my mistakes fester into a promenade of punishment. The idea of the “suffering artist” is one I no longer identify with for this reason. If I am taking the steps to create change, I am not suffering. I am growing.
Without fail, every single time, I’ll get most of the way through a really rad drawing, all free-hand, and suddenly The Line of Doom appears, and the balance and perspective is entirely thrown off.
Then what? Do I give up? Sure, sometimes. Sometimes turning the page is enough. But sometimes I just have to look at it through different eyes and find a way to make it work. It was absolutely essential to my survival to do as Ross Geller, the absolute worst character in the history of television, once said, “PIVOT!” Okay… Maybe that’s a bad metaphor. The couch ultimately didn’t fit up the stairs, did it? And instead of letting it go, they sliced it into pieces and… well, that was definitely a design choice.
The point is, as cheesy as it sounds, if you’re willing to change the way you look at things, the things you look at will indeed change.
Let’s look at this recent drawing of mine.
I begin all of my ink drawings in the same place: The eyes and face. I build the body around that from the top to the bottom, and then any background bits. Please remember before you feel weird about my style compared to your own: I have had many, many years of trial and error and study and flops to reach the point of being able to do this free-hand. Your mistakes make up your style. It’s never, ever, ever perfect, and often left incomplete in my sketchbook, but it always conveys a message. That’s what’s important!
I got all the way through the image top to bottom feeling really good about this one. So you can imagine my dismay when I reached her right foot, intending to draw a simple sock, and discovered I made a horrible mistake by making it the wrong angle.
Oh, the HUMANITY! I was AGHAST! I was FRUSTRATED! ENRAGED! AHHHH!
Now, hold on. Breathe. It’s not over. Remember the Doodling Directives: “Turn your mistake into a choice and run with it.” “Sometimes the message is better than the mess.”
TLDR: There is a lesson to be learned here. Let’s figure it out.
At first, I turned the sock into a total eyesore in the drawing by adding a million lines until I got the perspective right, because what else was I going to do? Leave it? Nah. So I added line art and it was practically a black hole compared to the rest of the image. What then?
The lines became a new design element. Everything was amplified when I began shading by line. The shirt, the pants, the canvas, the paint, all of it started without any lines at all, and now the whole image is covered in them. See?
Everything in art is all about balance. That’s the key, really. Adding balance. Removing balance. Balancing the balance. When I was done adding lines to her person, I realized that needed even MORE lines to meet in the middle between the white negative space and dark black line work. And in my artistic style, more is more! So I added circles to the circles that echo throughout the picture. Now it’s a drawing about energy. Now it’s about alignment. Now it’s about creating something and allowing yourself to come full circle.
A metaphor! A message in the mess! Oh, I love when that happens! (…it happens every time).
Working with ink in this way forcibly reminds me to look at the bigger picture, to be conscious and deliberate with my choices, to take my time and, if I need to, to let go.
Is it perfect? Nah. Is it mine? YEP! So I shared it to instagram, to tiktok, and now, the last thing to do is my favorite: GIVE. IT. AWAY!
This last step in the Free Art Campaign’s mission is indeed the hardest, though it is the most fun. I’ll probably take it to my favorite coffee shop with a sign that says, “Free Art!” and leave it for someone who might appreciate it more than me.
But, Andrea, you worked so hard! I tell myself. Why wouldn’t you keep it?
And the answer to that, obviously, is that I have mountains upon mountains of sketchbooks, each one full of drawings exactly like this one. They are my most precious resource, a wealth of information and a fortune which I have hoarded and hidden away over the centuries like Smaug the Dragon, or worse, an American billionaire. What for? I’ve learned the lesson. Message received, downloaded, transmuted, and owned. On to the next! And something I’ve learned over and over again in my life is that in order to make room for new things to come into my life, I have to let some things go. That’s abundance, baby!
Yeah, sometimes they have claw marks before I can release them. Sometimes they’re full of circles and lines that are designed to bring you back to yourself for a bit.