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eitherly

                                         My name is Skylar McClellan.
                                         I’m a boy.
                                   I am twenty years old and I’m the kind of person who looks over his shoulder
even when I’m leaning up against a wall.
Not in fear or paranoia though.
More so with a sense of curiosity.
I’ve been an artist since I was three.  You know... one of those obsessive little boys who lies on the
living room carpet for hours playing with my fingers on a notebook of lined yellow legal paper
drawing dinosaurs and animals and landscapes while the rest of the universe watches.
                                                        Over the years, I’ve always had an affinity for the sideways ways  
                                    of abstraction and saying things in such a fashion that inspires more of a
                                     poetic spark than what we might call reason.  
    I have a very definite philosophy about art and that’s based on a few concepts that of course
aren’t new because what is..?  But that doesn’t change the fact that I mean them

I’ve never been a fan of using very much color.  I do occasionally use it in a very discreet manner
but generally stick with black and white.
                            This is because I believe that art is creation on such a pure level that when color is used to make something beautiful, that’s hardly ever more than taking something that’s already there and putting it somewhere else.  Like recording a family of canaries sing their tiny hearts away and calling it my masterpiece symphony just because I’m the one who moved the sound from this side of the universe to the side where your ears happened to be.  
            A grayscale color scheme is what I use to try (otiose as it most likely may be) to defeat the threat of plagiarizing nature or humanity.  This isn’t to say that artists who use color aren’t talented or that they don’t create beautiful things with what they do because they do.  An artist’s talent isn’t at question when we talk about this because what someone is and what someone does are two very different things.
                                                      One should reflect the other, naturally.
                                                      But it’s nothing short of a variable.
                        Which leads to the second little bullet point on the grocery list of my philosophy.    

                      Anyone can draw.  
                      Drawing is a skill.  It’s learned.  
                                           
                                            I had an art teacher in junior high school tell me that he had to start
                   teaching the class.  For some reason he had no other choice.  I can’t remember why he had to.  I mean circumstances do that sometimes...  They get all crazy and stuff...
                     But the problem was that he couldn’t draw.  But he had to try to teach this class.  So he taught the mechanics of it all and he got the children drawing and everything was going fine until a kid would raise his hand and ask him to show them how to do something.  And he’d try and he’d fail over and over again because he’d just never given it enough attention throughout his life.  
So he went home and started practicing what he was teaching... the mechanics and the movements and the ways that all of his lesson books taught.  So by the time my grade had gotten to him, he could do it just fine.  Pictures he’d drawn lined the top edge of all four walls.
They were mostly cartoons.
Things that already existed.
Hardly evidence of any talent.
                This taught me this.
                Drawing is a mechanical process.  It’s moving your hand like this
                with this thing that has this stuff in it right here.
    What you draw... is the art.
    What you’re saying is the poetry.  The spelling comes after.  The rhyming comes after.  The
        punctuation comes after. What you say... is what you’re saying.  Period.
    This is why I’m annoyed when people ask me if I can draw something specific like when someone runs up to me
and: “Hey! Do you know how to draw a giraffe???”
And I say “does it exist?”
“What?  Yes.”
“Can I see it with my eyes?”
“Um yeah, you self righteous little prick.”
“Then yes.  Yes I can.  And so can you.”
And they storm off while I smile with the satisfaction that I’ve once again successfully protected my endeavor to decimate my social life.
..................................................I’m actually so completely kidding and not like that at all.
                                                                                     I’m actually pretty charming in fact.
                                                                  Um.
               Third concept.
               Talent is not the talent either.
                                    As established:
                                                ●    The act of drawing or building an image or anything for that
                                                                     matter... is all mechanical.  
                                                ●    What you draw is the art.  

                                                               But the talent itself is something that no
                    one should ever be impressed with because talent is as a dime a dozen as cliche sayings like “dime a dozen.”  Everyone has talent.  Everyone is amazing at something.  
                 It’s what puts the hue is “human”
        What you do with it is what people really look at.
        What you actually end up creating... the layers... a project you set yourself on that
                turns into something phenomenal...  That is what people will see a
                million times and still look twice when they look again.
                Just like with simple art. Or abstract art.  Art that looks like a five year old could do it.    
                              The kind of art that people who don’t know what
                              they’re talking about look at and say:

                “look at that!  I could sneeze and make something just as artistic as that!  It’s just a bunch of random dots and lines and they call that priceless!?  If that painting is priceless, then my two year old baby must be a billionaire by now because he’s made plenty of drawings just like that with his peanut butter!”

    To that person, let me say two things...  
First: stop feeding your baby peanut butter because I’m tired of cleaning up his masterpieces.
Second.....  Do it.  If you could sneeze and create something priceless, then do it and make a fortune.  Because then I really would be impressed.  The difference between your sneeze / Tyke’s peanut butter drawings and this alleged “random” masterpiece is the person who created that priceless work of art that you don’t understand probably didn’t sneeze to make it.  It probably isn’t random.  He or she probably sat there for hours or days or weeks to fine tune every single “random” smear of peanut butter on that canvass to make it so exactly how it is that they could look at it and point to any variance between it and a counterfeit.  
                Simple art is still art.  It’s still expressive.  It’s still doing exactly what something extravagant is doing.
                It’s still where it is and
                what it is because it was built and put there at the hand of incentive.
        As opposed to the assumed respiratory reaction to the stuff the world
        keeps cramming up your nose.

                It’s like when someone with a college degree in English cusses or uses slang to make a point because they’re masters and everyone knows it so everyone notices it when they say something simple because it’s usually also profound as ever.  I’m not calling myself a master of anything because I’m not.  But that’s the idea that I draw from when I draw something simple.

Example: what I like to call my signature.  The stick men I draw constantly, always doing and saying and being and feeling and knowing things.  They’re called ‘eyelashes.’  And every one of them has a voice.  They are meant to be very tiny simple people saying very big complicated things.  And I try very hard to make them what they are.  They know what they’re talking about.  So trust them.  
I know I do.

All in all and in conclusion and henceforth and whatnot...
                                             I’m obsessed with this.
                                            So I really do hope you can enjoy it because
                                            I’ve worked hard to try to create a universe worth knowing by name.

Email address: eitherly@gmail.com