Tools for my Muse

I am not much of a musician, and I am only a mediocre designer, I would never call myself and artist and lately I am finding that fact hard to reconcile. When I was younger, that is all I wanted to do, was to paint and write and draw. I did well in high school art class, I won some ribbons and even a best of show one year. I competed in the county fair and placed 3ed with an honorable mention. I was even accepted to a very prestigious art college in San Francisco when I was 17. Alas, the fancy art school was way to expensive to attend and I did not have the motivation to make it happen. Since then I have had the odd artistic renaissance every 10 years or so. I will dust off the brushes and the paints, knock the rust off of my decaying skills and try to do a serious work of art. It has been over a decade this time since I did a piece of art work I was truly proud of.

I do most of my work on the computer now, and I find that I am the jack of all trades and the master of none. I am a web designer, meaning I can manipulate pixels and make a cool logo or design. I have a knack for getting dramatic colors, but I also realize I am not as skilled as I could be. I know HTML and some programming languages, I can manage a project and I know how to deal with customers. All of this has served me well enough being self employed but it leaves me wanting more.

I have been told that it is a rare person that can design, write content, program, and construct the HTML on a web site while also leading the project, managing the help and dealing with the customer. Yet I take little pride in this skill set, I would rather be very, very good at one thing. I suppose now that I am 41 I long to be an expert at something. Every day I learn something else about my graphic program or I figure out another line of code. At this rate I will be 60 before I am truly excellent at either.

I bought a nifty tool not long ago, I have already used it several times to solve a graphics problem I was having. It is a Wacom Bamboo Pen Tablet. An input device that allows me much more control than a mouse does. This thing is very powerful and instantly all of the possibilities jumped into my head. Of course it takes time and practice to master, and it works great with a piece of software I do not understand very well (yet). I am hoping that this new tool will inspire me to learn what I have to and practice more.

Then there is the creativity issue, I do not feel very creative any more. I am not sure how to get it back, perhaps to immerse myself in art and view others creativity and hope some rubs off on me. I once read a book titled "My Name Is Asher Lev" and while I do not remember all of the plot, at least part of it dealt with art vs. illustration. A work of art should communicate something to the viewer (or reader or listener etc.). An artist has the ability to feel something and make that feeling come through in his art. I realized I was just an illustrator mostly. I could draw the lines, but I seldom came up with emotion. What I do on the computer has all been done before, and I copy a technique or method that someone else created.

I like to play my guitar, I do not claim to be very good at it, but I love to sit and strum. One of my favorite things is to drink beer with a group of friends and try to jam on some old classics. Once again though, I am only playing the chords someone else put together. In any case, I just put a Martin D18 in "Lay Away" at my favorite music store. Someday soon I will have an amazing instrument with which to play my sad 12 chords and scattered finger picking. It is fortunate that I enjoy collecting guitars as much as I do playing them. Daisy says when I bring this one home I have to sacrifice an older one. This I will do, gladly, to have the D18 but it would have made way more sense to learn to play the old beater I have first then get the awesome git fiddle.

My toys and my tools, my muse should be pretty occupied for a long time to come. If only she would wake up and give me a new vision to execute, instead of always being what has gone before.