Echoes of the past - where I have been
Preciosa (mixed media collage), Copyright © Attaining Creativity 2008
As I move towards a better future, and by better I mean happier, content, I see the echoes of my past directing me. It is as if a common thread of unity flows through our lives, regardless of how hard we attempt to disconnect ourselves from our past.
My echoes include my country of birth, Argentina, and its culture and music and food. Such echoes are evident in my writing, something that against all odds I have always been proud of: my sentences are utterly, painfully long, a trait of old Spanish authors.
It is that same thread of long continuity that I find in my drawings as swell – I have wavered between simplicity and laborious effort and it is only after I have labored over several paintings that took hours that I can simply draw a simple element in a piece of paper and be content.
As I look at my drawings, I begin to notice the lines of drawings past, of old characters. They have changed, evolved, yet their origin remains grounded in my childhood.
I have found old journal entries in which I described a second entity hidden within myself, which was shouting to escape, shouting to be heard. I have had that second entity most of my life, and yet I have forced it to remain quiet up till now.
In driving by my old middle school, I realized that those were my happy years. During high school, I found myself surrounded by teachers who truly encouraged me to try new things. They saw what I had been hiding, and they quietly helped me bring it out. It was during these years that I entered art contests and joined new clubs. As I write this now, I realize that I was not scared to do these things, but I was driven to do these things. It was purely a match in time and place in which I found the right arena and support to do these things.
With high school, however, came “responsibility.” It came with the fact that art by itself is not a well-though profession. It came with the responsibility to take all the required courses and forget those electives that actually make a well-rounded person. It came with the death sentence that all that I accomplished in high school would determine, forever, my path in life – it would get me into college, into a profession, into making the big bucks.
Yet I have to remember middle school, and I have to remember what fearlessness I had during those years, and use that fearlessness to keep moving forward, into a new future which is merely a recast, better version of my past.
