FanPost

GROW: The artist within

Lord Alfred Tennyson wrote a poem once, I learned it in the third grade for school. It was fitting because I lived on the beach and had my own stream brimming with Salmon in the fall and spring and a pair of Bald Eagles which I would watch from that beach. I am a very lucky man to have witnessed the raw brutality of an adult eagle dropping from the heavens upon an unsuspecting Coho, claws digging through silvery scales and deep into orangy pink flesh as blood flows and drips from one who has just been invited to dinner high up in the aerie. The sheer effort and power displayed y those wide wings pumping to return to a wife and children cuts right through me to this day. And, this piece of art brings it rushing back every read.

The Eagle

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

My third-grade teacher was one of five teachers I have had who reached me, he did so by eliminating the impediments to my learning. He literally opened the book and told me to finish it and when I did he went to the teacher of the next grade and procured their book for my use. But he did not give me my art, neither did any of the other four, though I will remember them always because they left a mark and helped me become who I am.

My art was learned in a garage in the central valley of California late at night once the valley had cooled. My family had moved away and I stayed with friends, it was kind of an unofficial halfway house for lost souls like me. I would stay up all night with another lost soul in front of his computer being a syntax and spell checker as he coded and then head to school when the sun came up. I cut my teeth in this environment, occasionally joining him in chew and always drinking coffee and smoking. After a few weeks, I would use the computer in the house to advance our project while he slept and then we would pour over the changes together when it got cool enough to survive the garage.

Despite the fact that what I make results in things you can interact with my world is not real, that which I write is not tangible or tactile, it is in my head, it is imaginary. I create structures and the programs humans use to manipulate them in the veritable ether. My strength is in fine tuning, I enjoy refactoring, I am weird. Nothing I will ever create will be good enough and yet to me, it is all my art. You may paint with colors, I do so with code. I see patterns everywhere around me, but not in the manners most do. My wife is artistic in the traditional sense she crushes me at simple games. She understands clothing, how it is designed and how it is constructed. I understand computers, how they work and how to convince them to do my bidding. I enjoy learning unspoken languages inside out, noting their strengths and working around their weakness.

-----------------------------

I don't know if there is a way to do this right, no real clue about a formula. I just know that my art is in languages most can not read, concepts that are imaginary and I get the same rush in it as I did on that beach watching those majestic birds so long ago. Who impacted you way back when what words struck you at the time and what is your art?

FanPosts are user-created content written by community members of Bad Left Hook, and are generally not the work of our editors. Please do not source FanPosts as the work of Bad Left Hook.