I just discovered something totally cool! But first...

Real, real, real. The word is an echo through the water of my spirit. Real, real, real. I must see real. I must feel (touch) real. I have heard real, but real as the scraps leftover from paper valentines are real. Waste not, want not--if I could gather all the pieces and make them into a whole, I'd have real. Maybe they shouldn't have been cut out in the first place. I'm as scattered as those scraps--to you, to me. Am I whole? Am I a gathering of pieces, or can I be purely whole? A multitude of colors can be very beautiful, but is it real? Maybe all the colored pieces can be put together with their likenesses and make it real... Yes. That's real.

Like the mosaics in God's house is this scattered-pieces feel--so beautiful in all its color, yet what picture is it forming? All lined and bordered are the pieces, looking broken. Take away the lines, the borders, and a picture, angled though it may be, shimmers out.

So precise, the placing of the pieces, so exact, copies of copies all the same. Clouds like fingernails; all roundnesses distorted to sharp corners, because we are imperfect, because we only cut in rough angles.

For a while now I've been trying to write poetry like Stephanie writes poetry--and mostly, I admit, like Isaac writes poetry. It's vague. It's confusing. It's supposedly real poetry, according to all the classes I've taken. So what I just wrote above is an attempt at writing real poetry (in prose form, like Stephanie does)--a try at becoming a real poet. As I was writing that, I still thought, That's not me. That's me trying to be like them. I don't really write like that.

And yet, I wrote it. Some part of it is still me. It's a part that their writing drew out of me. I thought to myself, Is that all my art will ever be? Reflections of others' art? And then it hit me. My art is not a reflection of others' art; it is a reflection of others. Somehow, though my art isn't wholly mine, it's mine in the sense that I still did it. I am the one who wrote those words, that strung them together, although I did it in trying to be like others. They're still my words.

And my art refers to my drawing, too. What I draw best is copies of photographs, like photographs of people. I have to have something to bounce off of, like one time when I drew a pirate, and another time when I made a comic strip of peas. :) I used a picture to draw a pirate, and I used the French Peas of Veggie Tales and some inside jokes in my pea comic. My comic is not a copy of any Veggie Tales video I've seen (besides that, I've only seen a few). The drawings are copies of the French Peas, but the situations I put them in are not even close to Veggie Tale related. The inside jokes are not only my own words--though some are--but the way I put them together is wholly mine. That's my art.

Now that I've identified it, I see it in every aspect of my life. My art reflects others, but it is still wholly mine.

That is so neat to discover.

-Stephanie

previous || next

Miss Something?

Social Anxiety with Guys - February 07, 2024

Education Expo with an ADHD Kid - February 03, 2024

Lovely Church Experience - October 22, 2023

Seek Out Community in Christ - August 29, 2023

Grieving Lost Friendships - May 08, 2023