Vocation #2: Being Creative?

I know I made it sound like that physics elective was the first time I ever learned about art, but that’s hardly the case. My mom was a physics major, but she ended up working for an art school, under the digital art department. I used to type all her powerpoints and course syllabus for a class she was teaching, it was about how to use photoshop. I was maybe ten or eleven. 

Some of the assignments were quite challenging, like creating highlights on an ice cube inside a cup of coca cola for lighting effects. I still remember some of it, I did try a few assignments, following the instructions exactly. It worked. However, when I was given a variation of the same assignment, I had no idea how to achieve that, even though I had just used all the same tools to create the assignment before. I knew I could only follow step-by-step instructions for it - I didn’t fully understand the point of each step. That’s when I thought maybe digital art was not for me. 

Later when I was fifth or sixth grade, I took another art class for half a year, it was a pencil sketching class. I was asked to imitate a pencil drawing, usually animals, sometimes tigers, sometimes lions, or cats. I was really good at imitating the drawing, extremely detailed, with a little bit of my personal style and twist. However, when I was asked to draw for myself, I had nothing I wanted to draw. That’s when I thought maybe I will never be an artist. This isn’t for me, I don’t even like sitting there and sketching, I thought. 

Around the same time, the headmaster of my class at the elementary school I was going to started this diary train activity. By the way, I recently found out it was called “Cultural Department Creative Kindergarten” (文化厅艺术幼儿园), maybe that’s why it was the only schooling experience I liked ever, outside of Tahoe. 

The diary train was essentially a notebook that was given to each row of kids to take turns to write diaries in, but also to showcase things they wanted to share with the rest of the “train members”. If I remember correctly, I was already getting either A++ or A+ on all the weekly writings I did, which I found out later to be extremely rare. Different from the weekly writings, this diary train is more casual, “be creative, draw, you must decorate it”, the headmaster, who’s also the literature teacher said. 

I took liberty and drew a bunch, I did it in colored pencils, colored crayons, color markers. I realized I like copying the look of neon signs or the fonts and marker paintings of poster designs of restaurants or cafes in Japan or Taiwan, which looked more or less like pop art. I liked it, I liked pop art. But I didn't think it was art, I thought it was poster design. Of course, the headmaster thought it was brilliant, she showed my work in front of the class often. Come to think of it, she made me known, I can write, I can draw, I can experiment, and it’s good. I’m sure it had a lot to do with my dad always giving her gifts under the table, but I still learned what I learned.