Writing an autobiography, so new an adult, seems premature. How much history worth telling can be stored into eighteen years? Not so much. Though I don't have as much life and travel experience as my peers and coworkers, my experiences with art have helped to shape me and have created a more driven "Me."
My interest in art started in the first few years of my life, even before attending kindergarten. Although I always liked to draw when I was a toddler (my childhood drawings still hang on the refrigerators of many of my mom's friends) I didn't know why I liked art, or that art could be the result of so many ideas. My grandmother, who lived with my mother and me, drew a series of pictures of me with Casper the Friendly Ghost. At the time, Casper was my favorite film. I loved how, with just a pencil, my grandma could create something so fun and realistic. Somehow, I could look at what was once a piece of lined paper and suddenly be gazing into an alternate reality where I could be wherever I asked my grandma to be, playing with whomever I wanted to be with. Trivial doodles were not so trivial anymore, and my imagination had sparked so brightly that it still hasn't burned out.
Once I was in elementary school, I excelled in every assignment that required creativity. The most enjoyable project that I remember from elementary school was a painting activity. Each of us chose a type of fish from a pile of pictures. I got the angel fish. We got to wear protective clothing and paint a replica of our fish on big easels. I stood in the middle of the classroom, in front of my easel, pushing the thick paintbrush against the big paper, and I don't think I stopped smiling the rest of the day. My fish looked like crap-with-fins, as I look back on it now, but I felt like an artist and I sequentially wanted to be an artist.
I didn't only like illustrated and painted art; I felt a true yearning to write. Writing essays and non-fiction was a disaster; I can't count the amount of times I wrote "I don't know" as answers to essay questions and daily journal questions; but I couldn't get enough of story-writing and poetry. In the same school year that I painted my angel fish, we got to write a small story and have it bound in a hardcover book. I didn't have to put any thought into how I would make it work. Other kids squirmed at the thought of having to think about their own story. A bunch of the books turned out to be similar to the end-result of my fish, total garbage. I on the other hand gushed with ideas and got a quick start to my story. It was, The Dog That Said Meow, an allegory in which a dog slowly turned into his enemy: the kitty-cat.
Art and creative writing followed me to middle school, where I won a district-wide "Young Authors Award" for a book I wrote as an assignment in sixth grade. The award ceremony was held at one of the high schools in town in their large gymnasium. The room was drab with its off-white walls, as ugly as the off-white tile floor, but the rows of tables were covered in mystery, comedy, drama, and fantasy books that, with their imaginativeness, lit up the faces and attitudes of the whole crowd. For the first hour, parents and teachers and other attendees were able to read the books of the winners. My book sat on a table next to only a handful of others written by fellow sixth graders. After a while, all of the winning students and their parents were assembled in alphabetical order, and in order of grade levels. There was a guest speaker, the author of the children's book, Stellaluna. The author also handed out our gold medals. I was excited to have been recognized for having a talent, and yet, the reward was an incredibly boring ceremony. After waiting and waiting for the other kids in other grades to receive their medals, I was too tired and bored to be excited when my own turn came. This didn't stop me from wanting to pursue creative writing.
Art was always my 'elective' classes, up until my sophomore year in high school when I started taking Photography classes for the rest of my high school career. My teacher was Mrs. Carducci, who had also been my freshman year Art teacher. Since I had been in her classes for years, I had special privileges. I rarely had to come to class and I rarely had to stay in class if I didn't want to. It's not that I didn't care about the class; I usually "ditched" only to complete my Photography assignments. We had to manually develop our own film, and a lot of my rolls didn't come out well. So once we started using digital photography, my Photography portfolio doubled in size. Art was often incorporated in my Photo classes. Mixed media was used a lot, and so was drawing and painting. I appreciated the variety of coursework because it left me with more opportunity for creativity and more ways to interact with the pictures themselves.
During my last year of high school, and my third year of Photography, I took a job at Sears Portrait Studio, one of the busiest in town. It didn't take long to realize that this wasn't the job for me because of my strong distaste of children. Every day, for long hours with no break, I put on my "sweet" voice and complimented girls' little dresses and the "cuteness" of newborn faces, secretely destroying the parents in my mind for baring such nasty kids. I can't even think of a moment when a child had charm, poise, or good manners. Instead, they screamed every time I'd take a picture. They'd scoot just an inch after I posed them, turning their pictures to garbage. They'd drool on the muslin backgrounds and blink at the perfectly wrong times. The parents were never better. Once, after a long day, the very last appointment showed up. It was for Halloween portraits of four children. One of the kids puked all over the carpet in the lobby area. I and my coworker tried to be helpful and ask if he was okay, if he needed new clothes, and if they wanted to reschedule. The mother yelled at her son for ruining his costume and told us, the employees, that we need to get some paper towels and clean it up. My coworker took the pictures, I cleaned the puke. Well, I tried. I saw pieces of chicken, macaroni, ham, and what might have been bread, all on a bed of yellow vomit. I too wanted to regurgitate. Apparently no one had taught this kid to chew his chicken-ham-macaroni sandwiches.
Every day at Sears was a struggle, except when I was selling. I was in my own little world when I was at the sales table with parents with big wallets. I often sold large packages, Christmas cards, and same-day prints that cost extra. I loved using the special techniques to sell more stuff, like, "They're only going to be this age and this cute for so long. These memories will last forever!" The fun I had doing sales did not make up for the disgust of my job. After a short holiday vacation, I never returned to the studio.
In high school I was extremely pessimistic and cynical, and that personality of mine showed through my art. The things I drew and painted in my high school days were similar to the drawings from my elementary school days, but instead they became crap-with-fangs or crap-that's-bloody. In a notebook we shared, my friend and I drew crude pictures, wrote things that no fifteen year old should have any business knowing about, and griped constantly about our peers. We were negative about life and human nature and our own friends and it felt great. Other teenagers became blinded by love, school spirit and living on a cloud nine. Of course, I felt the emotions that came with having fun and being excited and exploring new things; the only thing different was that I had reality and pessimism to pull me back into my head. This era was the most influential part of my life. That's the time when I established what I want out of life and how I would get there. I decided that I wanted to become a copywriter and I found out about AAU. In this era, I met the people who would inspire me and give me ideas, and I had great relationships with my teachers because they saw me as more than the typical teenager. Actually, in ninth grade English Honors, one-third of the class was cheerleaders. Toward the end of the year, we were all discussing a project where we decided what we would bring to an uncharted island. One of the cheerleaders was serious when she said she'd bring a cell phone. The teacher looked directly at me and joked, "Can we just kill them and start all over?"
Assuming the worst and thinking the worst in those around me led me to create artwork that I cherish, and helped me realize where I want to fit in this world. I have a little more faith in people nowadays, but I will never forget the times I spent contemplating why I hated everything, and the times I spent locked in my room slamming pastels and charcoal into paper.
Every once in a while, I dig up the box in the garage that's full of my family's old schoolwork, and in that box lies my grandma's old, not-so-trivial, doodles of a young me with Casper the Friendly Ghost. And someday, in my career or in my life, I would like to create something as significant to someone as my grandmother's art has been to me.