Artist

Art by Cee Fardoe is available here

“I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.”
– Jorge Luis Borges

The impulse to create struck me early. I dictated my first book to my mom when I was about three, and asked for my first set of paints the following year. My field of experience was naturally narrow at that age, given the relatively limited amount of time I’d had to gain new experiences. But what I saw, in books and in art, didn’t reflect me. I found colouring books particularly offensive, refusing to colour inside the lines. Instead, I hastily scribbled abstract patterns over the existing lines, usually in only one or two colours, before moving on to the next page to repeat the exercise.

I hadn’t experienced much yet, but what I had experienced didn’t resonate with me. So I started creating on my own.

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism the world has known.”
– Oscar Wilde

Before I fell in love with writing, I dreamt of being an artist. Paint was my medium; I knew it instinctively. Mom might correct me, but I’m pretty sure the first thing I ever wanted to be “when I grew up” was an artist. But my dream led to early disappointment. I showed no special artistic skill at all, lacking, as my seventh grade art teacher, a lovely man who meant well, said, “That magic line between brain and pencil.” It broke my heart to hear him say that because I knew he was right. I couldn’t put the art that I envisionned on paper or canvas, no matter how hard I tried.

It was that same year that my interest in writing began to develop in earnest. I wrote as if compelled by an invisible internal force, naturally and effortlessly, usually with no expectation that anyone would read my words. I wrote for the sake of writing – I needed an outlet, and words came easily for me. Art didn’t. It seemed, at the time, to simply make sense to focus on what I was good at, and art wasn’t it.

…looking back, I can’t believe how easily I gave up on being an artist. Art was the only challenge that I ever shrank from. I doggedly pursued all kinds of other activities that I showed absolutely no talent for, like gymnastics and synchronized swimming and singing. But the idea of being a bad artist was one that I simply couldn’t accept, at least at twelve. I felt betrayed – either by my brain or my hands, I’m not sure. If they wouldn’t allow me to be a great artist, I didn’t want to bother with art at all. The idea of constant disappointment in my lack of ability was more than I could bear.

The thing is, I never really gave up on art. It’s true that I stopped taking art classes, but the compulsion to create remained. Writing was like breathing – I needed it to survive. Art wasn’t like that, but ideas came to me, sometimes sporadically, sometimes a dozen at once, and I always acted on them. I found ways to work around my lack of talent, working primarily on collage art through high school.

At seventeen, I ran out of elective courses to take at school. I’d done everything that interested me but still needed to fill my class schedule. So I enrolled in art, just because I hadn’t taken it since junior high. It turned out that I still wasn’t talented. After three full years without a single lesson, I was also way behind my classmates. But I was lucky – I had an genuinely encouraging teacher who could see something that I didn’t. Being able to draw a perfect portrait was one thing, she told me, but if you just draw the same portrait over and over, there isn’t much point to that. It was more important, in her estimation, to have creative ideas – you could always learn to improve how you executed them.

I (mostly) believed her.

When I look back at my twelfth grade sketchbook, it strikes me just how undeveloped my skills still were back then – but also how much they improved with just half a year of lessons.

I would be lying if I said I could explain what happened between now and then. The fact is, I didn’t keep up with painting for long after high school. Life happened, as it so often does. I continued to pursue writing. I also travelled the world, and experienced all kinds of incredible art in person. From Monet to the Mona Lisa, Cezanne to Cy Twombly, I studied, in my own haphazard way, the art that we collectively love. But aside from a couple of small projects, I didn’t pick up a paintbrush again until the pandemic started.

Somehow, something that happened in between made the difference. I’m not more talented now than I ever was, but I managed to develop that line between my brain and my pen – or, in my case, brush. I can express the ideas that exist in my head on canvas in a way that was never possible for me before. Maybe it’s maturity. I genuinely don’t know. Maybe it’s just the fact that I let go of the idea that I need to be great and accepted that I can just be… I can paint because I love it and that’s enough. It’s possible that accepting that is actually what made me better. In a lot of ways, I hope it is. It would mean a lot of things become possible when we let go of the expectations we impose on ourselves.

I’m an artist. It took me thirty-five years of dreaming to get here. I’m still not particularly talented, in the conventional sense – I’ll never draw well, for one thing. But I have creative ideas that I can execute and the process is undeniably joyful. The fact that some other people actually like how those ideas come to live is a wonderfully gratifying bonus.

I intended to write this post to announce the launch of my first collection of paintings, Last Latte in Paris. That launch was a few weeks ago, and the collection is about half sold, but better late than never! What remains from the collection is still available under Shop: Work on this site. If you like what I create, of course, I’d be thrilled. But I know now that whether or not anyone does… and whether or not what I do is “good”… really isn’t the point.