^{part 2: words and images by Natty Moher}

One man’s attempt to win back his ex-girlfriend … and learn art.

            I’m, oddly, not feeling very artsy yet, and I don’t really get it.  I mean, I’ve been drinking a lot of red wine, but that’s pretty much par for the course.  I went out and bought a whole whack of  “Draw your favorite Marvel Superhero” how-to books.  (Who’s the most famous artist in the world? Exactly: Stan Lee.)  And I’ve obviously created a bunch of amazing splatter paintings.  But I just don’t feel like I’m an artist yet.

            I started to worry that this might be a symptom of my ex’s whole “Natty, you completely lack any motivation to achieve anything and, at best, are a subpar writer” thing. (Which, seemingly, were two different issues, but she was really good at making them seem connected.)  Was she right?  I’ve been an artist for almost half a month now, and have yet to really produce a single thing.  That seems amateur to me, and I’m no amateur. (I even started a DeviantART’s [http://nmoher.deviantart.com/] page, how much more legit can I be?)

            But then it hit me.  Did Escher start out drawing stairs that turned into more stairs?  Or did Salvador Dali instantly draw freaky ass melting clocks?  Or did that Toulouse-Lautrec guy automatically think, “I should paint portraits of hookers”?  No, of course not, these guys all started out drawing Marvel Superheroes (or whatever the appropriate comparison of the time would have been).  See, I haven’t created any art because I haven’t figured out what sort of artist I’m going to be (though I’m leaning towards being like Toulouse-Lautrec; he had a cane with booze in it.)

            So now I have a decision to make, perhaps one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make in my life: what sort of artist am I going to be (apart from world famous which, apparently, isn’t considered a category of art)?  It got me to thinking about my ex’s favorite artist, Robert Doisneau.  But I’m about making real art.  Robert Doisneau is a photographer, and any hack with a digital camera can be a photographer.  No, I’m a painter, I feel it in my soul, and that’s where art comes from (also drug-induced psychosis works pretty good).

            And then it came to me, in a drug-induced visit from Oscar Wilde.  In it he told me "Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetic of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating... they live the poetry they cannot write. As with Dorian Gray, Life is my Art!"  Which at first seemed to be of no use to me, what with me not trying to be a poet. So I was, rightfully so, kind of pissed off at drug-induced Oscar Wilde.  But then it made sense.  See, what drug-induced Oscar Wilde was trying to tell me was that I am the art, and the art is I.  

            So what does this mean? It means that it doesn’t matter what kind of art I make, as long as it’s what I feel.  If, in the moment, I feel like a splatter of red in the universe, then I paint a splatter of red on the canvas.  If I feel like I’m made up of a million tiny dots, I paint a million tiny dots on the canvas.  And if I feel like a bowl of fruit, well then damn it, I paint a god-dammed bowl of fruit (or order a fruit salad, ‘cause it might just be lunch time).  Because art is about getting in touch with your emotions, which, strangely enough, is exactly what my ex always wanted to talk about it.

            And there it is, one step closer to being a better artist and an even better boyfriend.