Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: The Creative Process
On the first day of class we were told that our final projects were to be creating an alternative text on almost any issue or subject that we wanted. I was very excited, I thought, “but being creative is something I’m GOOD at. Something I can actually do.” I enjoy writing but to be honest I don’t really like writing essays at all, and my entire degree was basically an exercise in learning to discipline myself at writing, which is why I chose academics in the first place. But the idea of doing anything I wanted was also a bit daunting, I mean I could only choose one subject. At first I thought about doing a piece on mental illness, which is something that is very important to me, but I just couldn’t decide what aspect to focus on, or how I wanted to incorporate something so weighty into an alternative text, one that I had never created before. So, after much deliberation, I decided I would do my project on something else. It took me a little while to decide about what I wanted to do. Both of my friends were doing travel related pieces, and even though that appealed to me, since I had lived overseas fairly recently, I decided I wanted to do something different.
I needed a subject that was personal, important, alternative, and that I would want to work on for a whole semester without getting bored. Then one day it hit me, why not do a project on the creation of an alternative text about creating alternative texts. I liked the duality of the idea and I then knew exactly what the project should be about. My brother Nick should be the subject. I know it doesn’t sound like an earth-shattering or socially meaningful topic, but really I think it is. For me, relating with my family has been an important, albeit difficult journey. Over the years my struggles with mental illness, teenage rebellion, and general disagreements have strained my relationship with my parents, and in that process my younger brother as well. I love my brother a lot, but I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know him all that well. We get along, now, though we fought bickered and drove each other nuts for years, but we have never really been friends.
My brother is quite a bit younger than I am, almost 7 years younger, which now that we’re both adults doesn’t seem like that much, but when we were kids it seemed like a huge gap. We have two older half-siblings, who are only a few years older than me. My brother Kier is 32, my sister Anya is 30, I am 27 and Nick just turned 21 this week. When Nick was born our older brother lived at home with us, but when Nick was only about 2 years old Kier went to live with his mom so from then on it was just the two of us. I remember in high school my friend did a psychology project on sibling order. They say one’s place in sibling order has a big impact. For me, and my friend who did the project, being the product of a blended family makes sibling order a complex idea. I am both an eldest and middle child at the same time which makes things interesting. I spent a lot of time looking after Nick when he was small, and I love him a lot.
Looking back, I am sure he was destined to be a photographer, when he was about five he insisted we go to McDonald’s (a rarity for our family) so that he could get the free prize, which was not a stupid plastic toy but a very small camera. He wanted to have it so he could take pictures of our cross-Canada road-trip. It was a funny little camera that required special cartridge film and we had to go all over town to find some, but there he was with his own camera. Unlike other young kids, who would probably get bored of having the camera after a little while, or forget about it altogether, Nick was very determined and took a lot of pictures all along the trip. I don’t know what he took pictures of exactly. He also collected postcards. We drove from Victoria to Winnipeg, through the Rocky Mountains and the prairies, taking a scenic route. Then on the way home we went through the US. North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana where we went to Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, Washington State and then home. For me it was an important trip, how often do you get to spend nearly three weeks traveling with your family going all kinds of strange and unexpected places in a car? Plus I was stuck in the back seat everyday with no one but my little brother to play with.
After summer vacation my brother started kindergarten and life started to change. One year later I started high school and my brother and I grew apart. Now that we are both adults, I wanted to get to know my brother better. My brother is a successful artist who has had a number of art shows and is now studying at The Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. My brother inspires me quite a bit and is very fearless when it comes to being himself.
So I decided I wanted to do a project about him and his art. It is an examination and a journey for me about discovering who my brother is through his expressions of self-identity. To be honest I learned a lot about my brother from the internet. Obviously, I know a lot about him, but there are so many things I didn’t (and still don’t) know. At first I wanted to make a website, it was more difficult than I thought and I have a blog which was a place for me to throw together some of my ideas (http://nickrobins.blogspot.com). But in the end I realized that I should stick to the advice previous students gave us, which was stick to what you know. I am a collage artist and I know how to make things out of paper... so I decided I’d do a magazine approach instead.
I ended up with a ten page magazine/scrapbook style piece. I chose square paper because it reminded me of an album cover and my brother loves music. For the cover I chose a self-portrait image that my brother has on his myspace page. Then I opened with a poem I wrote about my brother a couple of years ago when he left home to go traveling and my favourite picture of us together when we were little. Then I discussed and portrayed his art, and other interesting aspects about him.
I learned a lot from doing this project. As a teacher, I know that I will be assigning students to do creative works, works that have meaning for them, and then I’ll be assessing them. This will be difficult and I am reminded again what that feels like. I don’t know if anyone will like my project. My mom, who hasn’t even seen it was quite critical, I am not sure what she thought my project was and I don’t know whether she will like it. But ultimately it was my expression. The experience of doing the project was so important to me. I spent hours deciding which pieces to put in the book. I even got to interview my brother, albeit via email, and ask him the sorts of questions I don’t normally get answers to. The idea of being assessed scares me. I have learned that it is important to be open when teaching. I try to imagine if I were a teacher, how I would approach a student who had done a similar piece. When I am writing an essay it is different. Sure I am crushed if I get a bad mark or a teacher rips apart my work, but then I just tell myself that essays aren’t really my calling (which is true) and that my creative writing is the important thing. One time I worked on a literary arts magazine. I was an editor, but also a contributor. All the poems were selected without knowing who wrote them. It was hard to sit there and not say anything when other writers ripped apart poems that were important to me, and that I thought were pretty good. It was hard not to cry, and say “But you don’t understand, the rhymes were really hard to do and they make the whole thing flow when you read it properly.” All I could do was sit there and pretend I didn’t know whose poem it was. In the end some of my work did get selected, but it wasn’t the work that I had considered my best. As a teacher I need to remember what it felt like to have my work critiqued like that, and how hard it was. Creating my little book took a lot of time. I wrote a few small pieces, I researched, I selected, I did the interview, I printed all the pieces, and I had to do a number of reprints. Then there was the layout, paper selection, cutting out, gluing and artistic decisions which took many hours. Even still it is not perfect.
If I were in a high school classroom, and I had a teacher telling me what I could or couldn’t put in my project I wouldn’t have liked it. As it was I had to deal with my mom criticizing every picture I chose which drove me crazy, I mean whose work was it anyway, mine! I didn’t think a lot about grades while I was making it, but now that it is finished and I have heard what some other people are doing I feel self-conscious, what if everyone thinks mine sucks, what if no one understands, or maybe I didn’t spend enough time on it. I am a perfectionist, so I mostly try not to think about it.
When I teach I know that I will have to consider many factors when asking my students to create alternate texts. Firstly, it is not a skill that comes easily to everyone. Expressing oneself artistically can be emotionally draining and very difficult. I know some people who get very frustrated when they have to write a poem, or engage with a personal topic. Also the self-consciousness and fear associated with taking the risk of sharing something personal both with a teacher and one’s peers is hard to overcome. In the end though, I know through what I have learned that doing such a project is worth it. I learned a lot more about my brother and engaged in many different skills doing this project than I would have done just writing an essay on say, “A family member who inspires me”. I was able to think about things in a more lateral way and put ideas together in more complex structures, using poetry, colour, images, shapes, texture and contrast to depict my point of view. I was viewing, creating, representing, reading, speaking to people ... so overall it was a project that required many more skills.
The message I want to make is that one’s identity is fluid and complex, it isn’t one thing or another. Other people see us in certain ways which affects our identity, and we see each other in different ways. My brother wrote that he was worried he was a boring subject for a project. I couldn’t believe it, boring! He is so interesting, a lot more interesting than I am. Maybe he doesn’t see himself that way though. I wanted to highlight the complexities of identity, and learning to see people the way they want to portray themselves instead of just the way you want to portray them. To me my brother is a brother, a person whose place in my life is related to mine. Having a brother has helped define who I am and effected how I see the world. But that’s not who he is. Nick is a person, with a life, friends, and different views of my family than I have. He isn’t just a kid who annoys me and gave away my favourite purple Adidas shoes from Korea. He is an artist; he has had struggles in his life that I don’t know anything about. I want people to be able to view their own family members in a new way to see them as interesting people, separate from their roles in one’s life.
Ilan Robins, 4/3/2007
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