SELF PORTRAIT
“I’ve reduced all truths to a formula of life and death.” So how am I supposed to write about something personal? Can’t I just paint what I feel, and turn that in? Why can’t I replace my words with paint? Strokes from my brush help me express myself more than words on a piece of dinky paper. What if I took what I used to paint and added it to my writing. Swirling my brush around the paper and letting everything out. Squeezing the words out of dark corners in my head. I don’t really like writing, for the reason that I'm not very successful doing it anyway. Free writes are okay I guess, but if I
could paint what I wanted to say, it would be magnificent. Like music or poetry for some people, painting is how I express myself, not by writing personal essays. Do personal essays have to have a point, do they have to prove something or are they just supposed to be an entire piece about myself? What if I don’t like writing about myself, or even telling about myself to people? I do like to paint self portraits though, but how am I supposed to
write a self portrait?
I’ve always thought of myself as an artist, so why can’t I write like one? I know that I have a huge imagination, I can think of things that are complex and I know how I feel about certain aspects. The only problem is it’s all in my head, and it doesn’t want to come out the way you’re asking it to. It wants to stay cooped up in there, for only me to see. It won’t come out right even if I begged it to. The only way I know that I can truly give it justice is to paint it. I wish I could paint the world. I wish writing was that easy. When I say I want to paint something I know that I can, even if it doesn’t come out exactly the way I pictured it, it still comes out. With writing I can’t even picture it correctly, and when that abstract creature comes out and claims to be a poem, I fail. I don’t like to do things that I’m not comfortable with, like drawing with pen, it is so permanent it scares me, but even with that I know that it is possible to form it into something worth the black smudges and fingerprints. I can’t do that with writing.
Even if my life depended on it, words would let me perish. I couldn’t write myself out of anything. I love to read, I can read all day. Even that has its problems, like how I get disconnected when I can’t understand something. No matter what I am reading I will lose interest. For example a sentence like “If the debtor be in straits, grant him a delay until he can discharge his debt; but if you waive the sum as alms it will be better for you, if you but knew it.” Please, explain that to me, I almost fell asleep in the middle of writing that sentence. It has to be straight and to the point, let me put it this way; a second grader would understand it. My reading is somewhat like my writing, except the fact that I like reading, it is all very immature. But with reading, I can apprehend a sentence and then paint whatever emerges into my thinkbox. I can take a sentence like “WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” and paint it all. I can paint anything, and it can come out anyway and I will love it. On the other hand I can hate writing.
Why do we have to write so much? Why can’t we just make it short and sweet, to the point, like a second grade book? Yea it won’t be complex, but if we get the point across then hey, why not. Maybe that wasn’t that great of a question. I guess I can understand that one might have to write an ample amount of words for intended understanding. I guess it would be like painting a stick figure every time you wanted to represent a person. No you have to express that individual, with texture, color, line, and it has to form a soul. I know that writing has texture and color, and it has a soul, but I don’t know how to bring it out in the simple way of painting. Painting is so free, there are no spelling errors or sentence structures, just emotion and movement. I mean yea, there are some thing’s you might have to follow, like making sure there is a nice composition and being careful with colors, but you don’t have to do that, that’s why it is beautiful. You can make it anyway you want to.
It’s sad the way I feel about writing, I feel that I will never improve. It makes me feel like I have nothing to say when I have so much to say. It is funny, I just explained what I am doing for my personal essay to someone, and I explained it better than I wrote it. I should have written down what I said but I already forget what I told her. God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light, I wish that God would say “Let there be no more essays”. I wish everything was that simple. Painting and art in general makes me feels so satisfied that I feel that I don’t need to be able to write. If I don’t like doing it then why should I have to anyway? Just because I can’t write doesn’t mean that I can’t read, and it doesn’t mean that I’m not going to keep a journal or write when I feel like writing. I just don’t want to write on command, write when someone tells me to. Seeing as I can’t not
do that, I’m just going to finish what I am writing right now, and be done with it.
could paint what I wanted to say, it would be magnificent. Like music or poetry for some people, painting is how I express myself, not by writing personal essays. Do personal essays have to have a point, do they have to prove something or are they just supposed to be an entire piece about myself? What if I don’t like writing about myself, or even telling about myself to people? I do like to paint self portraits though, but how am I supposed to
write a self portrait?
I’ve always thought of myself as an artist, so why can’t I write like one? I know that I have a huge imagination, I can think of things that are complex and I know how I feel about certain aspects. The only problem is it’s all in my head, and it doesn’t want to come out the way you’re asking it to. It wants to stay cooped up in there, for only me to see. It won’t come out right even if I begged it to. The only way I know that I can truly give it justice is to paint it. I wish I could paint the world. I wish writing was that easy. When I say I want to paint something I know that I can, even if it doesn’t come out exactly the way I pictured it, it still comes out. With writing I can’t even picture it correctly, and when that abstract creature comes out and claims to be a poem, I fail. I don’t like to do things that I’m not comfortable with, like drawing with pen, it is so permanent it scares me, but even with that I know that it is possible to form it into something worth the black smudges and fingerprints. I can’t do that with writing.
Even if my life depended on it, words would let me perish. I couldn’t write myself out of anything. I love to read, I can read all day. Even that has its problems, like how I get disconnected when I can’t understand something. No matter what I am reading I will lose interest. For example a sentence like “If the debtor be in straits, grant him a delay until he can discharge his debt; but if you waive the sum as alms it will be better for you, if you but knew it.” Please, explain that to me, I almost fell asleep in the middle of writing that sentence. It has to be straight and to the point, let me put it this way; a second grader would understand it. My reading is somewhat like my writing, except the fact that I like reading, it is all very immature. But with reading, I can apprehend a sentence and then paint whatever emerges into my thinkbox. I can take a sentence like “WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” and paint it all. I can paint anything, and it can come out anyway and I will love it. On the other hand I can hate writing.
Why do we have to write so much? Why can’t we just make it short and sweet, to the point, like a second grade book? Yea it won’t be complex, but if we get the point across then hey, why not. Maybe that wasn’t that great of a question. I guess I can understand that one might have to write an ample amount of words for intended understanding. I guess it would be like painting a stick figure every time you wanted to represent a person. No you have to express that individual, with texture, color, line, and it has to form a soul. I know that writing has texture and color, and it has a soul, but I don’t know how to bring it out in the simple way of painting. Painting is so free, there are no spelling errors or sentence structures, just emotion and movement. I mean yea, there are some thing’s you might have to follow, like making sure there is a nice composition and being careful with colors, but you don’t have to do that, that’s why it is beautiful. You can make it anyway you want to.
It’s sad the way I feel about writing, I feel that I will never improve. It makes me feel like I have nothing to say when I have so much to say. It is funny, I just explained what I am doing for my personal essay to someone, and I explained it better than I wrote it. I should have written down what I said but I already forget what I told her. God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light, I wish that God would say “Let there be no more essays”. I wish everything was that simple. Painting and art in general makes me feels so satisfied that I feel that I don’t need to be able to write. If I don’t like doing it then why should I have to anyway? Just because I can’t write doesn’t mean that I can’t read, and it doesn’t mean that I’m not going to keep a journal or write when I feel like writing. I just don’t want to write on command, write when someone tells me to. Seeing as I can’t not
do that, I’m just going to finish what I am writing right now, and be done with it.