Mestiso Manifesto #16

Continuing from my last post, I’m moving out of the emotionally analytical and experiential part of what I’m dealing with at the moment and now moving into how it impacts the creative part of my life. Who am I kidding, this is me and this is going to get emotional.

But first, a quick update. It’s been three weeks since I last posted, and almost six weeks since I’ve been discharged from hospital. My health is still a work in progress. I think generally I have been feeling the same way for the past month without any obvious improvement. I believe that there’s more happening than what I’ve been diagnosed with. Until I get further medical analysis I won’t know for certain, but instinctively I feel it.

I’m really frustrated and defeated. As I’ve been dealing with this for a month and a half now, it’s taking its toll on my mental health. I’m starting to get tired of fighting against everything in my life right now and I’m at the point of surrender. I’m just exhausted.

The past 12 months have been an extremely rough part of my life, and I’m not going to list out all the things that have happened, because what’s the point? The one thing that all these situations have in common though is that they’re making me think a lot about my life and the choices I’m making. I think about where I am, what I want, and who I want to be. While I have no clear answers, I do recognise that I’m not happy and not living in a way that really serves who I am. Even though I have no idea who I am right now.

I have an overwhelming sense of mediocrity in my life, I feel like I keep going in the wrong direction all the time. My solution is always to jump to something else. But when you have lived a life of constantly jumping to something else, you look back and realise you haven’t gone anywhere, you’ve just run away from a lot of things without understanding what the real problem is. That’s where I find myself.

Let’s finally move into my art life. Well, there isn’t one right now. For most of this year I have struggled immensely with my art practice. I don’t think I’ve ever struggled this much with it before. When I say I can’t paint, it’s not a physical action I’m describing. I can easily put a brush in paint and wave it around on a surface. It’s just that when I paint there’s no feeling, there’s no vision and there’s no connection. There are blocks in place that I’m unable to identify or rectify.

I thought that by taking a break from exhibiting and dealing with art deadlines, I would be able rest and recharge to return with my full art powers. I feel no different now to when I first made that choice. I’m not entirely sure how to approach this.

I look back at my relationship with the work I’ve been making for the last 4 or so years and I don’t think I even like any of it. I have no idea if that’s even normal for an artist to feel about their work. If all my work caught fire and became ash, I don’t think I would care—and I don’t know what that means.

Even though the main theme of my work has been about the discovery of myself, I feel lost. I don’t have my artistic voice anymore and I feel like I’ve discovered nothing about who I am. Was what I was doing so frivolous that it eventually fell apart because there was no real substance to it? Was it just meaningless? Is that why I don’t particularly like it or have any lasting connection to the work? Is this the reason I have a lack of empathy for it? I think the only thing I feel right now is that I wasted years of my life building that body of work up.

I don’t even know if I want to paint, and that’s not to say I don’t want to be an artist. After everything that’s happened, my desire to be an artist has never wavered. It’s the one thing in my life that I have real passion for, and that will never change regardless of how chaotic my relationship with art creation is at present.  Maybe paint isn’t my medium, perhaps it’s something else. Maybe I need to explore new subject matter? Maybe I need to remove it? Maybe I just need a new approach? I am filled with a multitude of questions and no direction to the answers.