The upper hand: why artists aren’t destined to a life of Ramen and PBR [Back-to-School]
All articles in the Back-to-School section can also be found in a printed edition of District. Copies can be found in our offices at the Student Media Center located within Dyson Lab, 231 W. Boundary St.
I’m sitting on the floor of my friend’s dorm in Turner House. It’s my first quarter and I have violet gouache stuck under my fingernails and splattered across my hands and ankles. We are making color wheels for our 2D design class, globs of paint sitting on wax paper, waiting to be mixed into colors that are only moderately close to correct. Red. Red Violet. Violet Red. Violet Mud.
Meanwhile my friend is Skyping a friend from her hometown, a girl who is going to school to become an engineer. I catch a glimpse of the computer screen and see her friend sitting in a normal library with an average-looking textbook in front of her. She’s punching keys on a graphing calculator. And like that, I lose it.
What the hell was I thinking, going to an art school? I couldn’t even remember when I made that decision. I felt like a moron, like I was gambling with the rest of my life. I came to SCAD to become a screenwriter (the “screen” has since dropped off) and it felt like I was making a career out of something that was only an amusing interest, a hobby. I was sitting on the floor mixing paint like I was in Pre-K.
My brother, who is only a year older than I am, graduated number four in a class of nearly 800. I graduated number 70. He’s a neuroscience major at Johns Hopkins University where he works at the gym as a personal trainer. How’d he get into the school Dr. Gregory House attended? He was awarded a scholarship for more than $100,000 for being an exceptional violist. Future neurosurgeon, personal trainer, musician.
As far as sibling rivalries go, I was in second place (last place, first loser). And don’t even get me started on the fact that I came out first and he’s the one with a sugar daddy military boyfriend who’s attending Harvard Med.
He called me back in January to wish me a happy birthday. We caught up, asked how the other was doing. Naturally, he wanted to know what I had been up to.
“What are you doing in school?” he asked me. I told him about the inflatable sculptures we were making in Creative Thinking Strategies with large sheets of plastic, packing tape and small fans.
“What about you, what are you doing?”
“Oh, I got a job at the lab here; I’m helping treat a woman with both anterograde and retrograde amnesia. She lost a lot of her memory and can’t make new ones. We’re trying to give her her life back.”
“Wow, so we’re pretty much neck and neck then, huh?”
We’re brothers and everything is a competition, whether we admit it and regardless if it’s a close one. He has no problem telling me he thinks I have it easy. Every weekend is three days and we only take three classes a quarter. Our winter break is a massive chunk of time and so is our summer. He even got some family members saying, “Damn Eric, when do you actually go to school?”
That’s when I tell them how my drawing final took me 36 sleepless hours. That’s when I mention we don’t have worksheets with math problems where the answers are either right or wrong. We work with the theoretical, the abstract. We have projects; we create things out of expensive materials and priceless innovation. Don’t get me wrong, I know what my brother’s doing is hard work. But I work just as hard and I am just as smart — the only thing is that I use an X-Acto knife where he uses a scalpel.
I finally get the upper hand when I tell him: “You know, someone somewhere designed that scalpel you use to cut people’s brains. Someone like me, with a brain run by the right hemisphere rather than the left.”
People don’t seem to realize that the bowl they eat their cereal from, the phone they talk on, the clothes on their back were designed by someone. They didn’t come from nothing; they were carefully and thoughtfully designed, made a certain way for a certain aesthetic. They were made by people who understand the curves of a sculpture and appreciate the brushstrokes of a painting.
We work our asses off at this school. No one comes here to be second best. We know why we are here and what it means. Our photography majors do more than close a shutter. Our fashion majors know more than how to sew. Our writers don’t just have a way with words.
Some of us will make it and some of us will be burnouts. But it is very possible to be successful as an artist, designer or writer and careers in those fields are just as credible as careers in medicine or law. There is a science to art. It can be meticulous at times and fluid at others. It takes a disciplined flexibility. I still don’t think my brother really understands that though. He told me one day I could write a book about his life.
“Please,” I said. “I’ll write the book about my own.”
