Artistic Paralysis
Written 11/07/2007 12:58 AM, one bleak midnight
This is reflective writing, not creative writing. Don't expect this to be the most brilliantly written piece you'll see from me; I wrote this because I was feeling too thoroughly fucked-up last night to do anything graphical, so in the midst of my stagnation, I fell back on the only thing that comes naturally for me; write.

Each night was the same... that angry voice following my every move, drowning out the sound of my own thoughts with cries of protest with how I was creating my models in 3d. The viewport of 3d-Studio max had become a battleground to thousands of personal battles... confrontations I fought against the multitude of voices that kept telling me how things were to be done. Tonight had been little different; my task I'd imposed upon myself was to model a swivel chair, most commonly the type found in office cubicles. Straightforward polygon work that would've been a slice of cake for anybody else; but very other 3d artists had to face the nightly battles that I did. Obsession plagued every aspect of my design hobbies; not a single project I could embark without the methodical, nagging voice disrupting the flow of my work with ideas and procedures for how objects could be shaped... the "right" way to do things. Other voices raised up in protest from the other side of my consciousness, originating from the part of my mind that consciously tries to silence the obsessive thoughts from the recognized professional way to model something as painstakingly simple as an office chair.

And between the haze of conflicting thoughts, I felt nothing but the paralysis of too much thinking, too many conflicting ideas and ways to do things... with each edge I chamfered, each box I brought into the 3d viewport, came a myriad of possibilities in my thoughts that each struggled to be heard above the others; "use modifiers, John: this is best left parametric." "But this isn't turning out as well as it should." "Try extruding a Spline, then. Switch to Front viewport and sketch over a guide image." "Do you really need a guide for a bloody chair leg? Use your artist's mind, you shouldn't have to use references as a crutch to get things 'right.'" "But with modifiers, the shape wasn't turning out right in the first place." "Just use whatever works." "This is taking too much time and thought... you REALLY think you should be taking so long with a chair leg? Anybody else would have finished the model by now. You're slow, you spend so much time listening to the other thoughts, it's no wonder nobody's going to ever want to commission you." "Well, how am I to know which thought to listen to?!"

... and this continues, constantly... Perhaps a result of the Ritalin I'm so hopelessly dependant on to think and function with any measure of confidence. Yet without that pill, I'd suffer an even greater level of dissatisfaction; this time, of a completely different nature. The nature of a drug addict's self-inflicted illusion that nothing he does without his chemical bliss is acceptable, or done to his proper potential. In my case, I'm weary and ill-motivated without the Ritalin to model, write, draw or do or say anything that inhibits any element of creative expression. But whenever I take the pill that brings the only feeling of solace and comfort to my drained, world-weary and tortured mind, the soothing feeling of focus rises a chorus of voices to hound everything I do. It's the nature of my Obsessive/compulsive mindset that I be subject to the grip of my obsession; and with increased mental activity, comes the inevitable increase of those same cruel demands.

For me, the challenge is no longer being able to write or model 3d objects. The challenge is struggling to make my way through thick clouds of dissonance that fog my thoughts and choke my recollection of techniques that might help point the way through the numbing haze. Anytime I sit down to write, or model anything, banks of fog haze my mental view of what it is I'm trying to create, obscuring my mind's eye and making it impossible to think like an artist... and each night, all I manage to accomplish is another bitter reminder of why I've so little to show for my efforts. Why so many 'finished' models end up deleted because I'd failed to follow the path through my mind that my obsession demanded I take, and deletion of my efforts was the consequence I impelled myself to pay for disobeying it. So many things I'd sought to design in 3d... so many attempts that fell apart, never taking off the ground because I took too much time with it. Some might call it a boon that I've such an eye for detail; yet to me, the paralysed artist, I see nothing in that detail but the suffering it took to derive any sense of success from my work. Embedded in the 3d meshes I create are stories of personal battles fought the nights I'd drawn and sculpted those edges; memories of what I thought and felt and tried making sense of, preserved in each vertex, each polygon, each object a monument to the constant personal struggles I've no choice but to endure nightly.

And expressing these struggles required me to resort to the one field of creative ability that I bear any measure of natural talent with; writing. After reaching the brink of my tolerance with how much I could take from my obsession's demands, I wearily opened up Notepad on my screen and desperately prayed I'd have an easier time finding the words to explain my paralysis than I've had with negotiating with my own thoughts, time-after-time... anchoring me to square one of the drawing board with shackles that forever prevent me from lifting off and progressing on the journey to becoming a professional digital artist... my only hope for a future to support myself.