I as an Amateur Art Maker…

At least five times out of ten when I tell people I am an art history major, I would get the confused face from them and the recurring question:” So do you draw?” The confusion between art history and fine art is a plausible one because there seems to exist an assumption that art lovers are passionate about both the practice of making art and the theories/concepts in the history of art, and there are, indeed, many student who are more talented than me and can pursue a dual-degree in art&design and art history. However, for me, the studio art class, instead of the three-hour seminars and honor thesis class, appears to be the most intimidating class I need to take in order to fulfill the concentration requirements in art history, and that’s why I was too reluctant to worry about it and have been avoiding taking it until the last year before graduation.

It is not that I do not enjoy fine art practices at all. Actually, I always love making art. Fine art classes have been my all-time favorite among all the classes at school. I remember in elementary school, my art teacher would reward students who got five on all art assignments with a drawing of Digimon or Cardcaptor Sakura by her, which seemed to be in huge scale for me back then (actually about the size of a poster). This reward successfully motivated me to get fully engaged in every class and put huge efforts at all my drawing assignments. In middle school, I was fascinated by Japanese anime and manga. I watched so many anime and subscribed to multiple monthly MAG (manga, anime and games) magazines, and the idea of drawing my own comic naturally raised in my mind. I copied anime characters from anime posters and created my own cartoon characters. My dream to be a cartoonist evaporated with the increasing academic pressure as I entered high school. No more spare time to watch anime or read comics or magazines, but I soon realized another interest, graphic design, when I was making the class magazine. I spent hours on photoshop and pagemaker to design the magazine cover and to edit graphic illustrations in the magazine.

I have been wondering about how these passions gradually disappeared as I entered college and how I ended up keeping myself a respectful distance from the world of fine art. Being an art history major and being exposed to masterpieces over the centuries in classes seemed to have raised my standard for art makers in terms of their level of profession, and my hypercritical attitude, in return, also makes me more fastidious about myself when considering me making art. How can I, who is not in the art and design school and has got no artistic training before, be professional enough to make some satisfactory artworks? This logic seems convincing until I realized that the ultimate audience of artworks is actually the artist him/herself. Art historians may judge the aesthetic value of artworks, but the pleasure the artist get from the process of art-making could not be measurable by certain theoretical standards. In retrospective, the time I spent on polishing a drawing assignment, copying my favorite anime protagonist, and designing a magazine cover was really enjoyable and memorable. With this in mind, I finally get the confidence to reenter the world of art making and to start sketching another amateur drawing.