POLYSEMY Online ©2006

When I was at that art workshop in New York, I had a little exchange with Allyson Grey during which I showed her some of my drawings and said something like, "Well, I'm really a musician. This is just something I do for fun." As the words were leaving my mouth, a tiny voice in the back of my mind whispered, "That's bullshit, and you know it." Allyson also reflected that sentiment back to me. In hindsight, you could say that that simple insight was the little drop of food coloring in my glass of water that I refered to in my previous post.

It's been just over three weeks since that encounter, and it seems that the food coloring has finished swirling, and my glass of water is now a completely different color. In October, I will be moving to Denver to begin studying animation at the Art Institute of Colorado, and my study of music will then take the back seat. (By the way, Hannah has written a great article about art school, titled "Is Art School Worth It?", which you can find in POLYSEMY's inaugural issue). Looking back, it seems so obvious. This is what I wanted to do all along, but for whatever reason, I didn't see it. I identified as a musician so strongly that I was blinded to the possibility of pursuing visual arts, and particularly animation, in any serious way.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and bet that the majority of artists (or non-artists for that matter) have gone/will go/are going through this kind of identity shift. Actually, I think all self-reflective human beings go through this, but artists in particular seem to have a cetain kind of artistic catharsis when the structure of the artist's identity shifts in such a way that it allows the art to flow out more freely. If the artist's "self" is the vessel through which the art flows, then the architecture of that "self" determines how, where, and when the art flows. So if that "self" is shaped like a dam, then the art might not flow as readily as it would through something more like a tube or canal.

Now that I think about it, this is what my article in issue #1 of POLYSEMY is about. So the moral of the story is: get a copy of issue #1 and try to be more tube shaped.