Ruby Walker's Blog

The Ruby Walker Art Update: July 2023 [Archive Release]

Note: This is an archive release from July 2023; see my July 2024 notes at the end of this post. Please enjoy!

The Art Update: July 2023

Learning to paint greenery and finding the right workflow for my commissions!

Hello friends!  So much has happened in the last month (basically two months now, oops) – including a lot of new paintings and some really positive changes in my life! 
I’ve collected all of the news right here. And at the end, a selection of my current obsessions in art, music, poetry, and prose.  I invite you to sit down with a cup of your favorite beverage and enjoy this letter at your leisure. It’s summer after all. 

Green paintings!

I said in my last newsletter that I hoped to make some green paintings this month, and I totally did! I’m proud of myself for following through – and I’d definitely love to continue making sunny green paintings this summer; they just make me happy to look at. 

Through The Leaves (Middle Raccoon River), 2023.
Ruby Walker. Oil on canvas. 5″ x 5″.

The first one is scene from the nature preserve surrounding Middle Raccoon River – I went on a hike there in early June and loved it. I think the painting turned out really cute. It’s only 5 x 5 inches, so I tried my best to keep it simple and focus on the light. I’m going to make more of these little ones and sell them for $60. I’ve heard it’s good business to have originals available at different price points. I feel good about the result of my first landscape, but certain points during the process really frustrated me. I was PMSing, it was my first time working on such a tiny canvas, and I also filmed a process video which made me pretty self-conscious.

Cottonwood Trees (Out My Studio Window), 2023
Ruby Walker. Oil on canvas.

My next green painting was really, really fun to do! I just looked out my studio window and painted what I saw. I felt like I was really playing with the colors on my palette and enjoying the moment without getting fussy about the results. This one is 11 x 14 inches, which also gave me more room to play and use bigger brushes.  I’m thinking about giving it one more pass, but I might just varnish it and leave it like this. This is the kind of painting I would want to put up in my own bedroom. I’ll sell it for $170 if there’s interest, but I’d also be happy to keep it. It feels fresh and peaceful. 

ADHD and my problem with overly ambitious self-scheduling

Getting ADHD treatment again has been really helpful when it comes to my work, but it hasn’t made me into the absolutely perfect productivity machine I’d hoped to become. Darn! I was so excited when I started taking meds again and my symptoms improved, I made a really ambitious schedule for the month. But then it all crashed and burned because I did not factor in any time for breaks, mistakes, or bad weather. I do this thing where if I can keep a schedule really strictly, I feel great about myself and keep going. But once I mess it up once, I feel like I’ve failed and the guilty procrastination begins. Tasks pile up, and the bigger the pile, the more I want to cry instead of starting anything.  So my new goal for the rest of the summer is to have fun and try to get excited about my work. I do want to spend more time making art, but I think shame is a really bad tool for getting there. Generally getting into the studio as much as I can is good, but trying to keep a really strict schedule sets me up for disappointment. I’m a fast painter anyway; I don’t need quotas to get things done.

Finished Commissions Violeta Garza, 2023.
Ruby Walker. Oil on Canvas.

This is a portrait of Violeta Garza as a child in the back of her mom’s truck. I’m really happy with the way I abstracted the city lights in the background. I’m also happy with the face, which I had to repaint twice – but well worth it. Smiles can be tough to get right.

Valentina, 2023.
Ruby Walker. Oil on canvas.

This is a portrait of Valentina, my good friend Brough’s girlfriend. He commissioned it for their anniversary. I’m really happy with the pink roses – her favorite flower. That part of the painting came very easily. 

Quitting Instagram

Trying to keep up with the Instagram grind was causing me a lot of unnecessary stress, so I quit. That’s the short version. But of course, I had to get 40 tabs deep into a research hole to figure out why being a tryhard on social media was so addictive, yet so draining.  You can read Why I Quit Using Instagram as an Artist on my website if you want the whole spiel.

New Journal Cover The Moon (And Falling Stars), 2023.
Ruby Walker. Acrylic on found journal cover, 5 x 7 in.

I’ve been painting my journal covers for a few years now. I’m really happy with how this one turned out! It’s really whimsical and magical and it makes me happy to write, even when I’m stressed and not having fun otherwise. The front cover is inspired by the Moon tarot card, but the back I just freestyled. I painted the spine red, then metallic gold, in a dollar-store-craft-paint imitation of traditional gilding techniques.

(Bad photos of) more paintings!Rear Window, 2023.
Ruby Walker. Oil on canvas. 11 x 14 in.
SOLD

This is house – I think it’s used for an office – near my studio. I like the way the light on the back side is always on, it looks really interesting at dusk. Both of the photos in this section were taken in the worst light on my phone – I didn’t get a chance to take high quality photos yet and I wanted to share these. I may add more to this one at some point, but it was fun to paint.

Mortensen Road in the Rain, 2023.
Ruby Walker. Oil on canvas. 5 x 5 in.

This is another little 5×5-inch canvas that I painted after the first green one. It’s a scene from my bike ride home on a rainy day. I love this one and I think it looks way better in person.

Lastly, some art that inspires me: Creation Before The Myth, 2022.
Ida Floreak.

No words. I just love this painting.  You can check out the artist here.

Morning Walk, 1888.
John Singer Sargent. Tale of the Fern Flower, c. 1910.
Antonio Piotrowski.

Again, as always, admiring Sargent’s portraits. I noticed that Piotrowski’s had that same warm light outlining the shape of the subject’s jaw. 

Flowers to my Father (series), 2022.
Tagreed Darghouth (Lebanese, b. 1979). Acrylic on Canvas.

I really love the looseness of this one, the way it shows the physicality of the paint. I’m trying to get better at leaving visible brush strokes alone and not fussing too much.

Ophelia
Annie Ovenden (b. 1945)Portal, 2021.
Angela Lane.Museo di Casa Martelli, 2013.
Jane Irish.Sunblind, 2022.
Sean Lewis.

Thinking about light, as always. I’ve been really interested in artworks that have this kind of fantastical, transcendental, sparkling light.

That’s all for now, folks! I was really hoping to get some better photos of some of my finished paintings or to finish more commissions this month, but I didn’t quite get there. But that just means a chunkier email next month!  (Hopefully next month I’ll get the email done before the next month starts, oops… These things always take way longer than I think they will.)  If you got this far, thanks for reading. It means a lot to me.

Sincerely, Ruby Walker

Note from July 2024 (AKA the future or, by the time you read this, the past): My first year in an MFA program was intense, and I therefore neglected to update this website. I was busy making tons of new art, new friends, and learning so much. It got rough at a few points, but I didn’t fail any classes and I didn’t get fired, so I am adding it to the books as a “win.” Within the next few days, I will be publishing something on the topic of the last year, so keep an eye out for that if you are interested in what I’ve been up to. I will also finally be publishing my next Art Update, adding all my new work to this website, and possibly more! Lots to say, lots to catch up on!

Back on topic: this “Art Update” post was originally released as a newsletter in August 2023, summarizing the events of July. My goal this year is to keep up the newsletter throughout the semester, though perhaps pared down in length in order to make monthly updates more manageable.

I have been keeping track of new signups to the mailing list, although I haven’t published any newsletters in the last year. If you’d like to receive these new-batch updates as soon as I make them, feel free to sign up. I only feel it’s necessary to send a letter when I have something salient to say, so you’ll get emails at most once a month (and, as we’ve seen, sometimes once a year!) Therefore, I would like to posit that my newsletter is, in fact, the opposite of spam.

Why I Quit Using Instagram as an Artist

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The Ruby Walker Art Update: June 2023

This is the back-issue of my email newsletter! I’ll be posting each of these montly newsletters about a month late for posterity. And so that the only posts on this website aren’t my silly MS Paint doodles and pretentious essays from when I was 17. (I just read through all of them and realized I need to update this blog if I don’t want “Top 10 Gayest Paintings of Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus” to be all that represents me as a professional artist online. I mean, I stand by that ranking, but still.)

New Studio Goofin’

Hello friends,

It’s been a really wild couple of weeks. I graduated from college, moved to Iowa the next day (I know, Iowa?? But it’s really nice here!), and now I’m in the process of furnishing my very first solo art studio!

I love my new studio. Yes, it’s 90 square feet in a church basement, but it’s my 90 square feet in a church basement. It even has a fan built into the window so I won’t have to huff paint fumes while I work. Basically heaven.

My needs for my studio are more functional than aesthetic right now. I need to look through Facebook Marketplace and the local goodwill for some small storage shelves. But as long as I have something to put my palette on and something to sit on, I can put everything else together gradually.

What I’ve been working on:

I really try to treat my art with the seriousness of work, but at the same time, keep it playful and fun. That’s a tough line to walk, but if I’m not having fun, it’s really hard to put in the hours and effort that it takes to make something I’m proud of. And I have quite a few commissions on my plate right now. So I stay silly like it’s a full-time job.

With that in mind, I wanted to “break the ice” in my new studio and get started with something easy and familiar: a continuation of a personal series, from an existing reference, and not one of my commission projects. (I was also worried that my first painting after taking a month to hang my senior show, graduate, and move would be ugly; I wanted to take the pressure off.)

So this one is based on a set of photos I took in the screen printing darkroom back at Trinity. The overhead lamp is a dim reddish amber, but when you’re exposing a screen on the light table, it sends this sliver of bright blue-white light out across the lower part of the room. I love weird lighting situations.

This is a continuation of my “body doubles” series. I’ve been coy about overexplaining these paintings on social media, but it’s not really a secret either; I’ll tell you what I really think about. My only request is that you take a minute and look at this painting before you read ahead. What does it make you think about? My answer isn’t the answer.

When I was younger and a lot more mentally ill I would have semi-regular bouts of depersonalization. That is, feeling like I wasn’t myself, wasn’t really “in” there. There were two of me: the body, and the entity looking out from behind the eyes. Or sometimes I would feel (in a metaphorical sense; I wasn’t hallucinating) like I was watching myself from several feet away. I could see my hands but I couldn’t move them. I could move my mouth but I couldn’t speak.

It’s actually pretty common to feel this way on rare occasions (according to Wikipedia at least), but for me, it was frequent and disorienting. Looking back, I consider it part of my experience with depression and trauma.

So that’s what those double portraits are about for me. Even if you don’t relate to my interpretation, I hope you get something out of them.

Art that inspires me:

“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro, in his 2017 Nobel prize acceptance speech.

Kesra Hoffman
Light Through The Window, Sunset 1, Nimrod Hall, VA 2019
Acrylic on board. 12 x 9 inches

This is out of Kesra Hoffman’s usual grand landscape milieu, but it’s exactly the kind of painting I’ve been interested in lately. I love paintings that are all about the light. If you love this painting the way I do, she’s selling small prints of it in a set of postcards for $12.

This painting by Henry McCausland, which he posted quite mysteriously without a title or dimensions on Tumblr. I haven’t painted plants or greenery in ages, and I’m itching for it. Everything is so green here in Iowa right now. Fields and fields of blooming clover. It smells amazing.

These poems are friends.

Edouard Vuillard
The Flowered Dress 1891
Oil on canvas. 14 x 18 inches

Green, brown, gold, and a hint of pink. It took me a long time to notice the mirror in the background. 

Leon Wyczółkowski
Spring – The Interior of the Artist’s Studio 1931
Watercolor, ink, chalk on paper. 

I can feel the breeze. I’m obsessed with windows. Seems like lately, everything I love is green. 

I hope next month I’ll have some green paintings of my own to show you. There’s a cottonwood tree outside my studio that’s calling my name; my goal this month is to finally try plein air painting.

Thank you for reading. I hope this was interesting to you.

Sincerely,

Ruby Walker

A short comic about anger and joy.

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A Comic About Why I’m Seeing A Counselor Today

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Celebration! ‘Advice I Ignored’ is available as a paperback RIGHT NOW!

Click here to go get ’em!

Tell your friends, tell your sister, tell your dad, tell your teacher. And leave a good ass review if you like it! It’s such a strange feeling, to be putting the book I started writing in my notebooks at 16 out into the world.

I’m proud of my work and I hope you’ll love it too.

Here’s a little sneak peek at some ink illustrations from chapter two! The whole book is full of ’em.

 

 

Quick update – Advice I Ignored is live on Amazon this week!

[image error]Rejoice! Advice I Ignored, my lovely baby child of a book (with 100 ink illustrations and it’s so good read it blah blah) will be LIVE on Amazon within 72 hours! The paperback is a gorgeous little tome, and I’m so proud of my work. Tell your friends to tell their friends.

And most importantly, please enjoy a spicy little sample:

 

Five Steps to Feeling Human Again After You Go On A 28-Hour Internet “Research” Bender And Forget To Eat, Breathe Or Sleep

If I were a better, more honest person, I would deal with life’s pressures appropriately as they arise. That’s the kind of person everyone wants to be, right?

This girl tackles every challenge head-on. She keeps twelve different houseplants with varying humidity preferences healthy at the same time. She goes to bed at 9:30pm, moisturized but without so much moisturizer on that it ends up sticking her face to the pillowcase or getting in her eye. She wakes up excited to go out for a brisk morning jog. Maybe while she’s eating breakfast she catches an episode of This American Life: Ten stories about dogs who found business opportunities in unexpected places, and she thinks to herself, “Wow, that’s so me.”

Instead, I pretend I can shirk my mounting avalanche of ignored responsibilities by window shopping for vintage skirts on Etsy. As if that will fill the void! I pretend I don’t know I’m making a bad decision, when I really know exactly what I’m doing, as if I can fool myself! Inside my own brain!

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The thing is, everyone does this sometimes. Bad habits may differ but the guilt, shame, and lethargy we feel after binging on something we know we shouldn’t have is pretty much universal.

This shame will get you nowhere. Heed my warning, traveler: You don’t feel awful right now because you’re a horrible person and you deserve it. You feel bad because you’ve been neglecting your needs. The good news is that the past is behind you and the glorious present is right here in your hands. What you need right now isn’t punishment or excuses– it’s a bit of care.

Believe me, I’ve been to disappointment-ville so much I made a goddamn map of the place. I have a pretty good idea of how to get out. These are all just suggestions–pick one or two things from each list, going in order, and you’ll feel at least a bit better in no time. Let’s blow this popsickle stand, shall we?

Slink out of your room and eat something, please. AKA: Physical needs.

Drink a glass of water, or tea, or juice if you prefer. You need fluid!
Brush your teeth.
Splash your face with water and change into some clean clothes!
Take a shower if you can. If a bath is easier, go for that.
Have a snack. I prefer toast.
Do five jumping jacks — or more if you can. Even better if you can go on a walk. Even just a little bit of exercise can do a lot for your mood and motivation.
Is there a medication you take? Pop it.

Find a plant to water or a dog to pet. AKA: Emotional needs.

Care for your pets, or even just say hi to the neighbor’s cat. They have pure hearts.
Reread the first chapter of your favorite book.
Enlist a friend or family member to watch a movie with you!
Call someone you love up on the phone. Tell them you just wanted to hear their voice.
Put on a guided meditation video! It’s okay if you’re not “good at it” yet. Being mindful of your breathing, body, and feelings for just a few minutes every day can be a very relaxing and grounding experience.
Complete a small task, like taking out the trash. There is a feeling of pride that comes with accomplishing even the tiniest of feats.

Laundry. Hamper. Now. AKA: Environmental needs.

Do a load of laundry!
Care for your houseplants. (Gotta have ’em.)
Pick up any trash from around your room and throw it in the garbage or recycling.
Is the air kinda stale? Crack a window!
Get your kitchen clean. Put on some fun music while you’re at it.

Ask yourself: what am I avoiding? AKA: Work.

Do one small task.
Commit to chipping into the thing you are avoiding.
Are you avoiding certain thoughts? Why? Write or draw something about those thoughts.
If you have a homework assignment, make yourself a checklist. Break it down into little parts.

Why did that happen? AKA: Prevention.

Forgive yourself. That wasn’t wasted time – you were learning about yourself and your reaction to stress!
Say it with me: I deserve the comfort and rest of a regular sleep cycle.
And again: I deserve the nourishment of having three meals every day.
And again: I deserve the peace-of-mind that comes from facing my life head-on.

 

The Five Demons You Must Vanquish to Actually Finish Something

I’m about to drop something really obvious on you, so don’t give me shit: finishing things. It’s hard.

It’s not even just the actual work of finishing a long project. Have you ever been three steps from completing something monumental, and then suddenly you’re more stressed than you were in the beginning? There is less work to do than ever, but the end seems at once far, far away and frighteningly close.

In the murky depths of that coffee-fueled haze of stress and ambition, you must overcome five demons in order to finally see your work through…

1. I can do it whenever, there’s not much left.

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This hell-beast of a thought will take a few half-logical steps and have you convinced that, no really man, you don’t need to finish right now. I mean, there’s not that much to do, anyway, so why worry? You could finish any time you want. You just don’t feel like it right now. But like, it’ll be fine.

How to vanquish Procrastination: Make a realistic plan to finish. Break it down into small tasks. Don’t save the hardest thing for last, and at least make sure you’re doing something every day.

2. I’m so stressed! I need to take it easy.[image error]

This demon lure you in with the idea of sitting around on a sunlit porch, drinking S.Pellegrino with your friends and listening to the new Hozier album in peace. She holds in her grubby little hands a promise:

You can have it both ways. You can relax for a while and still finish your journey later.

It will feel like taking a vacation is the best way to recharge before you tackle your project’s home stretch. But when you’re in the grip of this demon, a vacation can last a very…

very…

long…

time.

How to vanquish Denial: Remember her tricks. Remember that stress is necessary sometimes. Ignoring the task at hand will only put more pressure on you in the future.

3. Everything must be perfect or I’ll die.[image error]

Just one more thing, and one more, and one more…

This demon will keep you trapped in the finishing touches. There will always be one tiny edit to make, or even several big edits. All your hard work up ’till now hasn’t been good enough. How could you have thought you were close to finishing?

How to vanquish Perfectionism: Heed this warning: it is far better to complete a good painting than it is to never, ever complete a masterpiece. The world deserves to see what you’ve done — even if it isn’t perfect. You can always publish a second edition.

4. This was a dumb idea in the first place.
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You thought you could finish the thing? Fool. Idiot. Scoundrel. You don’t have what it takes. You don’t have the guts, the skill, or the talent. Even if you did finish it, it would be a piece of shit. Don’t even bother. This was a mistake. You’ve been wasting your time. Give up. 

This demon will hit you with full-force doubt. You’re so close to being done, but all of a sudden you start to wonder: what’s the point? It’s not just bad execution, no, your little project has been doomed since the start. It was a bad concept. 

How to vanquish last-minute Regret:

The truth is, you’ve already put so much effort into the thing you’re doing, it would be an even bigger waste not to finish. Think of how satisfied you’ll feel when it’s done. Make a list of ten things you like about your project. Think back to what originally motivated you to try this. Are you going to help people? Create beauty? Fix a problem? The truth is, you’re only doubting yourself now because you’re scared to see your little brain-baby come into the world of real things. Let it happen. Don’t be a coward. This was a great idea.

5. Suddenly I have too many emotions about ______.[image error]

Of all the demons, this one is the easiest to miss. It relies on deception. It’s hard to spot because the problems it presents will likely be very real.

You really need to get all the clutter in your life under control. You have to create a schedule to fertilize that garden. Your skin is so dry — should you get that checked out? Those old family photos won’t organize themselves. 

Keep a careful eye out for big dramatic emotions about big worldwide issues or existential angst. Am I going to die alone? What should we do about human trafficking? If I weren’t so selfish would I go vegan? 

All important problems, but is now really the time?

How to vanquish Distraction:

Remember that you will feel more confident and capable of solving these other issues once you’ve finished the thing you really need to finish. Believe it or not, they can wait. You will be more effective when you can devote real time and effort to coming up with solutions to your worries, instead of just… worrying.

 

So you’ve been introduced to the five demons of completion: procrastination, denial, perfectionism, regret, and distraction. You’ve learned how to recognize and defeat their tricky ways. Now there’s something you should be doing right now, isn’t there?  What was that? 

Oh, right. 

Get out there and kick some ass!

 

 

Essay: Tell A More Interesting Story

The following essay, loosely based around the writings of Oscar Wilde, was written for my honors Queer Writings class at Austin Community College on April 23rd. 

Tell A More Interesting Story

     Wildflowers are a sign that I’ve lived another year. I can’t seem to believe it until I see them blanketing the grasses by the roadside, those little strips of the Texas prairie that civilization has allowed to survive. I am reminded of that first spring I spent numbly wandering through the smell of Earth in bloom—the one right after my fifteenth birthday, right after I dropped out of high school, and right before I learned to imagine surviving to adulthood. And I am reminded of the spring after that when I had laid my adolescent death wish to rest, and I could finally smile at the idea of a fresh beginning. Now it doesn’t feel like any time has passed at all ‘till cold rains flutter indecisively into a scorching early summer and I see the brown-eyed susans raising their little yellow banners in victory. Wildflowers are a sign that I’ve lived. I have decided this, and so it is true.

If identity is just a story we tell ourselves over and over again, then that story by nature can be changed.

     I have a habit of making symbols out of ordinary things as if my life were a movie I could pick over and analyze for hidden messages. I know there’s no such thing, but I do it all the time. I have a glossary of personally meaningful nonsense stored somewhere beyond my brain and behind my heart. For example, the moon is a sign of enduring truth. Although it appears to change shape in the sky, its true form is static; it only depends on where the light happens to fall in that moment. Just as Oscar Wilde wrote in his famous prison letter De Profundis, “At every single moment of one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.” Past, present, and future phases exist at once in the spherical moon.

     Wilde goes on to write, “Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.” A symbol is anything that stands in for some other concept. Symbols only have meaning through human interpretation. According to NASA, the real moon is just a mass of iron, olivine, and plagioclase feldspar flying through space; recent scientific research into personality indicates that the way we think of people as characters with enduring traits may be nothing but a comforting myth. Yet just because symbols have no inherent meaning does not mean they are meaningless. In art, as well as in life, meaning is created and shared. If identity is just a story we tell ourselves over and over again, then that story by nature can be changed. Through this comparison to symbols, Wilde suggests that to live an artistic life is to take in the whole cornucopia of human experiences both positive and negative and to simply tell a more interesting story.

 

Who Am I?

     Philosophers have long struggled with a problem called “the persistence of identity.” People want to know: Who am I? But even those three simple words carry a host of further questions. “Which you is who? The person you are today? Five years ago? Who you’ll be in fifty years? And when is am? This week? Today? This hour? This second? And which aspect of you is I? Are you your physical body? Your thoughts and feelings? Your actions?” Many people spend years struggling to find out who they really are. But I would argue that who we are is not something meant to be found like a prize in a scavenger hunt, but something that is created by the stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves.

“People can use their wonderful brains to think differently about situations… to reframe them, to reconstrue them, to even reconstrue themselves.”

     In an episode of radio called “The Personality Myth,” NPR host Alix Spiegel talks to a psychologist whose research challenges something most people take for granted about their identities: “The idea that there are specific personality traits that we all have inside of us that are stable and consistent and will determine our lives.” Walter Mischel started out his career trying to study these personality traits, but when he ran studies and dug through past research, evidence suggested that this kind of stability of personality over time and across situations simply doesn’t exist.

     For example, Mischel cites a large study on children’s honesty by researchers Hartshorne and May, which found that the children they were studying were never simply honest or dishonest. Thousands of children were given numerous opportunities to be dishonest at school and home, but the same kid who was a model student in history class would cheat every day in math. Their behavior was not consistent across situations. In the past, every time a study like this would come out, the researchers would assume they did something wrong. It must have been a mistake. But Mischel thinks the mistake might be in researchers’ assumptions, not their results. His own research finds that “people are predictable, but they’re predictable because we see them in situations where their behavior is constrained by that situation and by the roles they’re occupying and the relationship they have with us.”

     But where is the individuality in that? Are we fated to operate like automatons, acting out the expectations of our circumstances? No. There is a third player in this game of identity that Mischel calls “the mind”: our attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions about the world and ourselves. These form the lens through which we view our circumstances, coloring our actions and in turn continuing to cyclically shape our ideas about who we are. And these stories are within our conscious control as long as we recognize them as changeable. “People can use their wonderful brains to think differently about situations,” Mischel says, “to reframe them, to reconstrue them, to even reconstrue themselves.”

     A few years ago I woke up, wiped the crust from my eyes, vomited again, and poured the last of that disgusting peach vodka into the toilet. I decided to never drink again. I did not have the energy to be dramatic about this. I brushed my teeth and went back to sleep.

     Nowadays the story I tell myself about alcohol is completely different from when I was drinking. This isn’t because I have changed — in fact, it’s the reverse. I had to edit my personal narrative around drinking in order to change. Otherwise, my sobriety would only last as long as the emotional whim that started it. One by one I tracked down and eliminated the insecurities that had caused my problem in the first place.  I can open up to people sober. I am fun when I’m sober. The final victory was when I was able to switch from I’m quitting drinking to I don’t drink.  The former is a struggle. The latter is a simple statement of an identity that has changed.

Art As Practice

Writing and rewriting the narrative of my life through pretentious symbolism is the only way I know how to function. In that way, art is a means of survival.

     Wilde writes in De Profundis, “the artistic life is simply self-development.” I believe that the meaning we create for ourselves through identity is a form of art. I view creating and engaging with art as practice for creating meaning within my life. Reading novels and poetry as a child taught me how to deepen my experience of life by creatively interpreting the world around me.

     The symbols I’ve invented have helped me consciously edit the way I view the world. They keep me sane. Doesn’t that make them “real?” I remember exactly how real it felt when I bought my first bicycle helmet. On the physical level, it was a hunk of blue head-shaped styrofoam and plastic, but in the fairy tale I created out of my interior life as a sixteen-year-old, it was a peace offering. It said, I now care enough about my life that I will buy safety equipment. This new story I was starting to tell, the one where I wouldn’t end up dying young, was fragile still. It needed something to hang on to. So I chose that helmet as its symbol, and I held it up as proof against later urges to self-destruct. I am not going to break down tonight, I’d think,  I own a damn bike helmet. I want to live.

     And it doesn’t matter if the meaning of that helmet was entirely fabricated, a private performance, because it worked exactly how I wanted it to. I learned every psychological trick I know from artists and writers. I paint my nails yellow when I want to feel joy. On Saturdays, I light candles and drink red hibiscus tea. I write important dates on the bottom of my boot so that I’ll never lose them. I am determined to eke out as much joy from life as I can get, and if I can’t get any, I’ll still find some of that classic emo-kid satisfaction in the dramatic tension of my misery. As Wilde wrote in De Profundis, “humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences.” What kind of story would I be living if there were never moments of pain and defeat? Writing and rewriting the narrative of my life through pretentious symbolism is the only way I know how to function. In that way, art is a means of survival.

Working Within the Medium

     Finally, it is important to note that within any artistic medium there are limitations. A painting is, for the most part, two-dimensional, no matter the colors. A tapestry is made of cloth, no matter the subject. A novel is mainly comprised of words. This is also true for the creation of identity. A person’s actions and circumstances shape their experience, which is the text onto which the interpretation of identity is applied. You cannot begin to change what you’d like to change about yourself if you are not aware of what is beyond your personal control.

He is using the tools of art to shape his experiences into something he can bear, through the only thing in his incredibly poor situation he can control: his own worldview.

     Sexual orientation, for example, appears to be inborn. For some people, it changes over time, but few have seen positive results in trying to force it to change. In my case, the fact that I am attracted to women is simply the text of my life. It could not have been any other way. Within this fact, though, I can do as I please. I can act on my feelings, hide them, hate them, or love them. I can do all of these things with gorgeous inconsistency. I have decided to admit to the way I am and to feel content with it. Sometimes I call myself a homo, other times queer or gay. If I’m feeling courageous I can be a lesbian–I am only a dyke when provoked. 

     Wilde himself obviously didn’t choose to love men, but he did choose to create beauty and leave an enduring mark on the world through that love. Literary critic Guy Willoughby writes of De Profundis: “Presenting his own troubled history as a self-conscious creation, he adjures his audience to review his life according to the tenets of art-criticism, whereby all his deeds may be faced, condoned, and integrated into a complex and suggestive artifact.” Wilde spends a good bit of the letter discussing how, within the circumstance of his imprisonment, he is fighting against the urge to become bitter and spiteful. He says he is more-or-less okay with suffering, but he “could not bear [the suffering] to be without meaning.” He is using the tools of art to shape his experiences into something he can bear, through the only thing in his incredibly poor situation he can control: his own worldview. In this way, despite his moralistic bent in the letter, Wilde’s notion of artistic survival is highly individualistic. He writes, “Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with. And the first thing that I have got to do is to free myself from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world.” The letter reads to me as a struggle to become different by thinking differently, turning over past events, past writings, even the life of Christ in a search for solid enough symbols to ease the pain of his imprisonment and disgrace.

In Conclusion

     It is impossible for us to know exactly what Oscar Wilde meant when he penned the words “Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol” at the end of one paragraph in a very long letter from prison in 1897. He might not have meant much by it at all; maybe he just thought it sounded smart. Despite this, I consider it entirely within the spirit of his work to take this witty little phrase into my life and make something important of it. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol, because both are constantly searching for a way to be more meaningful. I have decided this, and so it is true.