Art is Hard.

A Rambling Post In Which The Author Begins By Pitying Herself, But Quickly Turns Into A Post About Art, Which Then Evolves Into A Monologue About Karate...Much Like A Real Life Conversation With The Author.

(This is a fairly long post. Feel free to skip to the last paragraph to get the gist of it.)

Seriously...it's hard. Art is, in many ways, like karate...(karate also being an art, but I'm talking about painting and drawing right now.) As soon as I think I'm pretty good at it, I look around and realize exactly how much I need to learn and how much farther I need to go.

(Author's note: no one has EVER told me that I wasn't ready to do something with karate. I have always been the one to tell myself that I needed to work harder at something else first.)

When I first started karate, I sort of knew the first kata (Pinan Nidan, if you're interested) from taking lessons previously. I made quick progress in "learning" the rest of it and then got impatient to learn the next one. In art terms, I had learned how to draw a stick figure of a human being. I knew where the head was in relation to the neck and the feet (Dr. Nick: "The arm bone's connected to the wrist bone. The wrist bone's connected to the... something. The something's connected to my....wrist watch. ... Uh oh.") but I didn't know how the joints work, or muscle structure, or even how to draw hair without it looking like it was gelled straight down.

Being me, however, I desperately wanted to show it off, so I bored various friends and family members with my stick figure rendition of Pinan Nidan. (ahem...sorry about that if you were one of them. Heh.) Soon, I realized that not only was I unready to begin learning the next kata, I REALLY didn't know this one. Slowly, instead of being corrected on the basic stick figure, I was being corrected on joint positioning and finer details. Instead of being corrected on which way to turn, or which foot was in front (or behind), I began to be corrected on more minute details of stances or hand positions.

Sweet! I've improved tremendously! Now, I figured I was ready to learn the next kata! Then I started watching some of the black belts doing theirs. Whoa. This was like looking through a museum while I was still drawing with crayons. Outside the lines. Mentally chastened, I kept working on my Pinan Nidan. Now, I'm certainly not museum quality, but hey...I can look at myself and think that I'm farther along than I was.

I need to put more time into both painting/drawing and karate. I also need to remember that there will always be someone better than I am, with a different style and more experience. Art (both karate and drawing) is not a contest, or a race except against myself. I need to remember not to get frustrated when it seems like I haven't made any progress, because I have...I just may not be able to see it.