Just the letter K, drawn last night as I watched a few episodes of this and that… probably not finished, but probably never will be.
Yup, just as the title suggests. When faced with a new little sketchbook (and I have been buying two of these little ones every time I go to the Kelvin Grove Markets) I am forced into doing something of note on the first page. This time I went ‘screw it’ and just started sketching this K. It probably isn’t finished, it probably never will be, and shall certainly never recieve any typography awards. That said, for a ‘just start sketching and see where it goes’ type letter, it isn’t doing too badly.
I have decided, for some reason, that if I have numerous of these little notebookie-thingies, that I won’t be so concerned about screwing up in them. Yay for fooling myself. Annnnyhow… I am not going to write anything of great note right now. Not here, in any case. I have to go get suitably attired for leaving the house, so that I can go grab some milk and foodstuffs down at the shop. More tomorrow!
A quick note on the picture above, before it goes into the hugely long post of today. I’ve entitled it ‘Dandelion Dreaming’ and it currently occupies a place in one of my ‘real’ sketchbooks. Please read on – the site has been live for a month today, so it is a bit of a long post to kinda reflect on this fact.
Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia – the fear of imperfect creative activity on paper. A word first coined in this post. It may not be a ‘true’ phobia, but it is certainly something a lot of us must face at one point or another. Ever sat down to write a hand-written letter and been scared to start because you just know that you are going to misspell something? Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia.
Whilst the above example is certainly pertinent, the more common one for me has to do with sketching in a nicely bound, beautifully presented sketchbook – not the spiral-bound cheapies, or the lecture notepads… with those, you can always just turn another page, or even tear it out. There is something special, something exquisite about a sketchbook that is just waiting to be a showcase of the things that flitter around on the edge of your consciousness, works in their own right waiting to be committed to a journal, which, while rough and underdeveloped at times, you would be proud to hand to someone else and go ‘this is mine’.
Having a ‘digital sketchbook’ such as this blog may go a way towards battling this, but I am able to, as with the ‘cheapie’ sketchbooks, pick and choose what I display here. I can toss away the incredibly bad bits and pieces and just throw up the ‘this is passable’ stuff. It just isn’t the same.
Thus, I’ve started trying to draw in ‘actual’ sketchbooks now and then. It is something that I have seemingly avoided for quite a while – it does actually scare me. I see pictures of people’s sketchbooks and I am in awe of the things they produce, page after page of perfection – or at least, that is how I see it. How can I live up to that? Sketchbooks such as these are creative works in their own rights, no matter how much people may argue to the contrary. Whilst they may not have the centre-stage such as a well-worked painting under spotlights may have, I find them to be just as interesting, just as relevant, just as fascinating – perhaps even moreso at times because it is so raw and often unfiltered.
Anyhow, this roundabout post is kinda just trying to point out that I am trying to do something about this silly fear I have of ruining a perfectly good sketchbook. ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’ is the old saying, and I’m coming to realize that it is a saying I should pay more heed to.
On May the 16th, 2008 I started a little blog on the spur of the moment, thinking ‘if not now, then when?’. It was updated only semi-regularly, though the goal was for a once-a-day sketch as it is now. It was frequented only once in a while by a few friends, some family and so on. I never did anything to promote it, beyond telling a person or two.
Then I had a chance to do my major assignment for my coursework on a subject of my choice. This website became that project. The saying ‘It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt’ did occur to me, but I had been doing that forever – if no-one ever sees your work, then they can’t point out that its not great, right? But nor are you going to get anywhere or move forward. Whilst I don’t generally go in for the whole ‘self help’ mantras, this one has always rung true for me: ‘If you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always got’ (Tony Robbins, in case you were curious… I had to look it up). So I did it anyway. I could have gone with a safe project, and written an essay, but instead I decided it was time to promote me.
On the 29th of August, after weeks of learning css on the fly, modifying wordpress themes and making a place to call my virtual own, KatJohnston.com went live. As of the moment I write this, I have had 1,293 visits to this site, ranging from people I know, to people that I certainly hadn’t met before this project went underway. I’ve been putting myself out there on social networking applications: facebook, twitter, delicious and more, actually trying to get people to see what I do, who I am, even if it is just the rough sketches and flittery thoughts rather than the refined works. I’ve been consistently throwing up at least one sketch a day, even when that sketch is barely more than a few flicks of a pen to say ‘there, I’ve done a sketch, now I need some sleep’.
Before I started out on doing this, I wasn’t drawing consistently. I wasn’t doing something day by day, every day and I certainly didn’t feel as if I wanted to be in my studio every waking moment. Right now, I cannot wait until my time at university is over. I am still working strong on assignments with another month ahead of me, but I’m almost counting down the days until I am done and will have time to paint and draw for more than a minute here, or an hour there. Believe it or not, doing this has actually made me enthusiastic about something that has fallen to the wayside for far too long: creating.
Perhaps it is the fact that people are actually seeing my work, or the fact that I have people now who I know check this site day by day to see what I have drawn. Perhaps it is just that I can scroll through these pages myself and go ‘you know, I actually like what I do’ in a way that can’t really be done with scraps of paper scattered from one end of the house to the other in a dozen different books and places. It isn’t life-changing stuff, its just random thoughts, random sketches and things that make me smile – but it has made a real difference. I’m showing my work to people, risking ‘failure’, rejection and more by throwing the good up with the not-so-perfect, but I’m doing it anyway. I’m also starting to sketch in sketchbooks now. Yup, I am a little scared – I think I always will be when it comes to this. But I’m doing it anyway.
Something has been ventured: everything has been gained.
I know, it is rather a mouthful, isn’t it? A friend and I have looked high and low to find a proper term for a fear of ruining a blank page. We have found fear of blank paper (vacansopapurosophobia), fear of imperfection (atelophobia), fear of ruin (atephobia) and fear of failure (atychiphobia), but none quite describes it perfectly.
What am I talking about exactly? I’m talking about the fear of ruining a beautiful, pristine, blank piece of paper. The fear that so many of us seem to face as we stare down at that first intimidating page in a brand new journal or sketch-book, sitting there so full of amazing potential of what ‘could be’; that is, until we make that first stroke of a pen, the first sweep of a brush. Not one, single mistake lies between cover and cover yet: its perfect. The things that could potentially rest on those pristine sheets are the things dreams are made of – until we actually write or draw in it and stuff it all up with a misplaced squiggle or a crossed out word.
Its easy to look at an empty sketchbook and imagine all the great things that could go on those pages. Its much harder to actually make the move to do so, and risk creating a garbled, disorganized mess; which in my case at least, is far more likely than having it turn out to be the new next best thing to Da Vinci’s journals.
All those phobias above are just fine, well and good, however they do not capture that specific fear that we artists, writers, and other creative individuals seem to face. They are general and overarching. Am I afraid of all blank paper? No, not at all. It isn’t blank paper by itself that scares me, but the ruining of said paper by creating something unworthy of it – messing it all up. Is it a fear of failure? Well, of course… but it isn’t a fear of failure overall, it is fear of failure at this one specific task of drawing something good on paper that deserves a good drawing.
Thus, I propose that we actually name this fear. No-one (so far as I can see) has made a good one yet, so it might as well be Lins and I who coin the term. Here are a few options, for those who like choices. Credit goes to Lins for coming up with the words from their various etymologies:
Atepapyrophobia – a fear of ruined paper.
Word origins: ‘Ate‘ from Greek Ate (goddess of rash destructive deeds). ‘Papyro‘ from Middle English / from Old French papier / from Latin papȳrus, papyrus plant, papyrus paper / from Greek papūros.
Atekanevaphobia – a fear of ruined canvas.
Word origins: ‘Ate‘ from Greek Ate (goddess of rash destructive deeds) ‘kaneva‘ from 1260, from Anglo-Fr. canevaz / from O.Fr. canevas / from V.L. *cannapaceus “made of hemp” / from L. cannabis / from Gk. kannabis “hemp,” a Scythian or Thracian word.
Ateloaetorrophobia – the fear of an imperfect creation.
Word origins: ‘Atelo‘ from Greek ateles literally ‘without end’, meaning incomplete, inchoate, imperfect. ‘aetroro‘ from the Greek aetorrous literally meaning ‘creating’.
Atelodemiourgiophobia – the fear of imperfect creative activity.
Word origins: ‘Atelo‘ from Greek ateles literally ‘without end’, meaning incomplete, inchoate, imperfect. ‘Demiourgio‘ from Greek ‘demiourgia’ literally workmanship, handicraft, meaning creative activity.
Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia – the fear of imperfect creative activity on paper.
Word origins: ‘Atelo‘ from Greek ateles literally ‘without end’, meaning incomplete, inchoate, imperfect. ‘Demiourgio‘ from Greek ‘demiourgia’ literally workmanship, handicraft, meaning creative activity. ‘Papyro‘ from Middle English / from Old French papier / from Latin papȳrus, papyrus plant, papyrus paper / from Greek papūros.
I for one think that ‘atelodemiourgiophobia’ is the better, broader, overarching term for this fear of failing in creative endeavours. After all, I have the same problem standing back and looking at a blank canvas some days, as I do looking at that brand new bound sketchbook waiting to be drawn upon. But I don’t know… Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia works too. And is far more impressive!
The sketch that accompanies this post? Well, perhaps it is my own little theraputic way of trying to overcome this phobia. Its drawn in a sketchbook. A good one. I’m never going to create the stuff dreams are made of between those covers unless I dare to give it a go now, am I?
Another random sketch and one I do not yet think is complete. She’s telling me she wants more and I’m telling her ‘later’ because I need to throw something up onto the site now! So I will throw up a ‘completed’ one later, if a completed one later happens to exist. It started off with the face, and then the curves down below… then things sort of started growing from there. Where it will go… I actually have an inkling or two, but I’m going to keep them to myself and leave it as a surprise when you see more of her.
A little interesting link today, because I know how much I love finding these little gems of the internet: One Mile Scroll, which I discovered through my twitter feed thanks to @caroline, another twitter user. It turns one whole mile into a scrollable webpage, complete with the option to contribute height markers along the way to make the scroll more interesting. A novel way to deliver little factoids alongside transforming “virtual space into an actual, physical distance”.
I must admit, I wasn’t expecting Twitter to be of much ‘use’ to me when I started playing around with it, but I have actually been finding it incredibly fun to get involved with it. Yay Twitter! Oh, if you happen to want to join me on twitter, the username is KatJohnston (original I know), or you can just click here to see my Twitter profile. An incentive for joining me there? I send out an update on Twitter automatically each time I post a new entry on here – so you can be the first to know when something goes up!
Edit: just adding in another interesting little link because I am sure that some others would enjoy it as much as I do. Before I die I want to… is a project that takes snapshots of people with polaroid cameras (who have stopped producing their materials and is thus ‘dying’ in its own right) with their hand-written statement of what they want to do before they die on their photograph. The site then states that it wants to go back and actually find out if people have done what they have set out to do after a good period of time has elapsed. I love the concept behind this, and the execution is also just great. Well worth a look. Uhh, and if anyone happens to have a polaroid camera and some film in Brisbane and doesn’t mind taking a shot of me, I’d love to have my picture up there too! Can anyone hook me up?
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