I make art.
It’s pretty cool, actually. I don’t really remember when I started painting, but I remember it being something I always did. Art classes at school were my favourite.
For any class project, I volunteered to make the poster. Believe it or not, I nearly failed chemistry because the doodles in my notebook were against the “code of conduct”.
I don’t think I had an idea of wanting to become an “artist”. It was just something I did. Later, when I committed to art school and started really learning it, between the technique, the deadlines, the art history tests, it was sometime around then that I wanted to be an artist.
But you don’t just become an artist.
Being a painter, that’s not really a “real job”. Or maybe I didn’t even want to be a painter; I just wanted to create. At some point, I had chosen my career. After brief stints of interest in archaeology, journalism, and politics, I decided that when I grew up, I would become a fashion designer. I spent hours upon hours daydreaming up new silhouettes, mornings on the weekend in front of the TV watching runway shows, sketching clothes I imagined on women, picturing them walking down red carpets.
I watched every season of Project Runway I could find. It was not on TV, at least not in the country where I grew up. I would always try to find episodes on YouTube.
If that didn’t work, we had to download the Russian-dubbed version from torrents. But I watched it all.
I developed an interest in fabric once I realised there was much more to creating an outfit than just sketching. I got a sewing machine, an old manual Singer, that had been passed down to me by someone in my family.
And that’s it. That’s where it stopped.
Abruptly, around the age of 16, I completed my last art piece: the only garment I had ever made was a colourful 5-meter-long scarf I had a vision for, and I only managed to finish it because my mom secretly picked it up as a hobby as well.
Around the same time, I also created my last painting.
I didn’t create anything. It was a year, two years, three, four.. Then ten, eleven… It’s not even that I never tried. I did. I always had art supplies and empty canvases. From country to country, apartment to apartment, a box of supplies collected dust.
I always picked “making art” or “painting” as a hobby on dating apps, with the loose math that if it’s within +/- 10 years, it still counts as an actual hobby, right? If anyone ever asked, and spoiler, they rarely did, I would simply say that I do it for myself, and unfortunately, not as often as I would have liked. So technically, I never lied.
I felt for years a yearning to create. It is a feeling that I can best describe as a crawling sensation, a perpetual feeling of slight discomfort, a tiny voice in the back of your mind, occasional waves of despair for not being able to create anything, mild, quiet agony, invisible but persistent.
After university, I decided I wanted to pursue bartending and become a cocktail bartender. For a few years, when I pursued this career, I found that agony had faded. Flavours and spirits replaced my brushes and paints. I learnt the classic cocktail recipes, developed new skills, created menus, and won competitions.
I didn’t see it then, but when I look back at it now, I was feeding my need for creativity through “mixology”. I was creating unique flavours, I was playing with ingredients in the same way I used to play with art.
Although I continued working in various capacities in the drinks industry after Covid started, it was never the same.
Many of the struggles I experienced during that period were self-evident, but only now can I look back and realise that the restlessness I felt was because I lost my space for self-expression.
The restlessness came back, stronger than ever. This time, there was nowhere for me to put it.
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