Before We Learned to Colour Inside the Lines

When I was four, I (against my mother's wishes) covered the walls of our house with what I called “art”. It was mostly just unnecessarily long, uneven lines that flowed from one wall to another, alongside the classic childhood drawing most of us have drawn: a house, a tree on either side, grass beneath, and clouds with birds chirping away into them. There were lots of pinks, yellows, and Hello Kitty stickers. Mind you, this was a rented apartment. There was no way we could get the colours off the walls, and when we finally moved out, my parents had to pay the price for my artistic endeavours.

I kept drawing. But as we moved from one house to another, the drawings on the walls grew fewer and smaller. The bright colours that once occupied entire walls began to shrink into little corners, and I became increasingly careful about where I drew, hoping my parents or the landlord wouldn't notice. By the time I moved out of yet another house at twelve, I left it pristine. Not a single sticker. Not a single drawing. Not a mark on the walls.

I don't remember the exact moment I had decided to stop, or whether there was a moment at all. But I wonder if it had something to do with growing up and learning what art was supposed to look like, and exactly how much space was my imperfect art allowed to occupy. With increased exposure through school and social media, I constantly encountered people who could paint with precision, draw with proportion, and understood the nuances of color theory. They were artists. “Real” artists.

And what I made? Well, that was just a child's scribbling.

Except at four, I hadn't thought of it that way. I hadn't stopped to consider whether my lines were straight enough, whether my colours complemented each other, or whether anyone else would find my drawings beautiful. I had simply wanted to make something, and so I did. When, then, did the act of creating become inseparable from the ability to create “well”? When did art stop being something I could do and become something I had to prove I was capable of doing? And most importantly, who gets to decide who qualifies as an artist?

Over the years, I've met some wonderfully talented, artistic, and creative people who are remarkably hesitant to call themselves artists. They would much rather call themselves anything else. They paint, but only for fun. They write, but only occasionally. They doodle in the margins of their notebooks, call themselves bathroom singers, or dance only at parties. They create beautiful rangolis and mandalas, but only with the help of stencils. They are undeniably creative, and yet, when asked whether they consider themselves artists, they hesitate.

Their art could be better, they tell me. They aren't as good as the people they see around them. There is still so much to learn, so much to improve, and so much distance between what they create and what they imagine a “real” artist is capable of.

And I find myself wondering when we began to believe that we had to earn the right to call ourselves artists.

Perhaps it begins early. We learn to draw within the lines, colour without going outside them, and make things that look small and neat and recognisable enough to be praised. We receive encouragement when our work meets expectations and corrections when it doesn't. Art becomes something to get better at and something at which we can succeed or fail.

None of this is inherently wrong. Learning a craft takes patience, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to improve and achieve creative mastery. But somewhere between learning and evaluating, we seem to have absorbed a specfic and rigid idea: that until our art reaches a certain standard, we haven't quite “earned” the title of artist. And so, we qualify our creativity. We say we just dance, just paint, just doodle. As though the word just can make our participation in something beautiful a little less embarrassing.

But what if we took away the audience? The comparisons, the expectations, the pressure to produce something impressive? What if nobody was watching, nobody was judging, and there were no standards to meet? What would we make then?

I suspect many of us might return to the simplest reason we create anything at all: because something within us wants to find expression. A feeling that needs somewhere to go. An idea that refuses to stay inside our heads. An impulse to move, to make, to play, to make meaning of our experiences, and most importantly, to create. Before art became something to perfect, it was simply something to do. And maybe this is where we need to begin again.

Art doesn't begin when we become good enough at it. It begins when we engage with the impulse to create. And each one of us is capable of witnessing, creating, and being moved by art. This is innate to the human experience.

We carry memories, feelings, and ideas that are uniquely ours and we find ways of expressing them, be thorugh conventional art forms or through the countless smaller acts of creation that fill our lives. We are not all painters, musicians, or dancers in the technical sense. But we all possess the capacity to participate in the creative process, whatever that may look like for us.

So, pick up the damn crayon. Use stencils if you must. Be a bathroom singer, a party dancer, a bedroom poet. Paint the sky the wrong shade of blue. Draw on your walls (Just maybe check your rental agreement first). We are artists when we are beginners, and we will be artists ten years later, perhaps when we've acquired the skills, the technique, and the mastery we once dreamed of.

And even if we never get there, we are no less entitled to the title, because in many ways, we have been creating all along. We create experiences, stories, memories, relationships, traditions, and meaning. We shape the worlds we inhabit and leave traces of ourselves in the lives we touch. We take the ordinary materials of being alive and make something out of it, sometimes intentionally, sometimes without even realising it, making us all artists and creators of our own lives.

Maybe then, creation was never something we had to learn.

To be alive, is to be creating.

About the Author:

Yashika is a counselling psychologist and facilitator based in Pune. An avid admirer and creator of art, she is interested in exploring the relationship between creativity and self-expression, and the many ways we make sense of ourselves and the world around us.

References:

Shotwell, M. (n.d.). At what point can you call yourself an artist? Philosophies, histories, and the weight of a title. https://www.malloryshotwell.com/post/at-what-point-can-you-call-yourself-an-artist-philosophies-histories-and-the-weight-of-a-title