The art of un-belonging

Dear Friend,

I was thinking about the things I did back in my teens and twenties.

Waiting for a serious operation, I guess I’m reviewing these last six decades.

That time I bleached my hair peroxide blond (and discovered that my face is actually pink. I looked like a startled beetroot)

That time I tried to centre-part my curly hair and tame it with brylcreme (the ‘I’ve just been a swim in the chip pan’ look)

Those tie-dyed shirts in the late 80s, which I summoned up the courage to buy, but only rarely the courage to wear.

Perhaps we all do this - search for where we belong. Belonging is important. What clothes might identify us with others we want to ‘be similar to’. What music. What attitudes.

We seek a place to belong then - certainly this is my experience - we find increasingly that we're in tension with that place. We discover that we both belong and do not belong, simultaneously.

There is a meeting of ease and friction, of comfort and grit.

Every time I have felt aligned with a group, trend, fashion, ideology, tradition, I come also to see the ways I’m not part of that group. I see what connects and what differentiates. Almost inevitably, I gradually disconnect. I start to un-belong.

I belong. I move on again.

It’s perhaps how we mature and grow. To find a place then leave it again.

The peroxide blond grew out. The curls reasserted their essential anarchy. The tied-dyed shirt sat in a drawer, reminding me of money I’d spent that I could hardly afford.

Each commitment, even though it did not last, was not wasted. In choosing to ‘be like others’, I saw how I am not like others. I'm like you and not like you. I think both are true.

A similar process of dis/connection happens in my artistic growth. I find a style, artist, medium or even a single picture that appeals to me. I connect with it. I imitate, or am inspired by it. I explore what it offers me.

Then I find the ways in which it does not satisfy me, limits, frustrates or - fairly quickly - bores me. I move on again.

That’s what sketchbooks are for, isn’t it? To try out the things for oneself that are not for the eyes of others?

The process of connecting and moving on can feel - when I’m prone to self-criticism - like a lack of commitment. Like a constant grabbing at shiny new things. I think that’s not so. It’s about developing a sense of self, of measuring myself against the world around me.

My art is unlike anyone else’s, yet is connected to the work of many other artists and artisans. I am part of traditions and outside of them. I am unique and just like everyone else.

I never went back to bleached hair, nor to slathering grease onto my curls. Those were moments that (thankfully) passed quickly. Those tie-dyed shirts though - if I still had them, (and could still fit into them), perhaps they’d still speak to a little bit of who I am.

We connect, disconnect, and sometimes reconnect, and find that, as we grow older, we navigate a spiral of accumulation and discarding.

All of it is good.

All of it is a sculpting of the self through immersion in the interplay of I and Us.