Interior spaces are challenging. When I sat down to sketch this view from inside the Billings Public Library Saturday, I felt so ready to just give up and find a simpler scene to sketch. The outside is so (comparatively) easy, but the inside should be the same as the outside, right? Only inside out. But it isn’t. The view is constrained by walls and ceilings and floors, and it’s all closer. And by being closer, more demanding of attention. There is no sky to take up a third of the sketch, and the lights and fixtures hanging down from the ceiling seem more complicated in perspective than any simple block of buildings.
I like being outside; the breadth and depth of the scene give my eye and my mind freedom to wander. The geometry and perspective inside follow the same rules, but something is different.
Spending time inside this building made me uncomfortable. Not uncomfortably physically or emotionally; but uncomfortable, as I was thinking of my own artistic ability.
I’ve been struggling with my art lately. Well, not so much the art itself, but the “business” of art. The “am I good enough” bit of it. I can be a pretty good watercolorist, sketcher, even writer sometimes. Technically. But “creatively,” I feel stagnant. I have created some pretty interesting things lately, but worry that they don’t highlight my technical skills. Conversely, I worry that focusing on my “comfort zone” will just create more of the same. How do I marry my technical abilities with my creativity to come up with something I truly believe in?
Or is this just a logical step in one’s growth, this dissatisfaction with oneself, with one's art? They talk about artists pushing boundaries with their art, but I feel contained within the walls I built up around me. Ability, comfort, expectation, fear. Just like I felt constrained by the building I was sketching in.
My current artistic abilities restrain my creativity. I revert to what I know. I seek comfort in my art, so that which brings me discomfort (trying new things, making mistakes) tends to keep me working “safely”. The expectation that I need to continue to make art of a consistent or better quality than my previous stuff keeps me trying to create a similar body of work. Then fear. Fear that I am not good enough, that I am nothing more than a mediocre artist; that tends to keep me stuck as well.
To sketch a building from the inside requires the same basic rules as sketching from the outside. There is a horizon line and internal objects have vanishing points. What took me a little while to wrap my head around was that the vanishing points, the place where two parallel walls, or where the ceiling and the floor meet at the horizon was outside of the room, outside of the building.
You have to focus outside the walls in order to understand the inside space.
And I think it's the same for my art, my creative journey. In order to move ahead I need to look outside the walls, to focus on a horizon where my own parallel lines meet. Outside of the container I’ve locked myself in.
So sitting in the library with my sketchbook, once I sort of figured that out, there still might have been a little bit of indecision, or hesitation. But I started to realize, I can draw this.
I can do this.