What Rust Remembers

On stepping away, coming back, and the skills that wait for you.

One of the hardest things about being a creative person who is interested in lots of things is deciding what of those things to pursue. My professional creative life has been dotted with jobs that, while still broadly creative, were all very different. I was a technical theatre major in college, which meant I was focused on scenic and costume design. My first job out of college was as a prop master at the Texas Shakespeare Festival, which was a fantastic experience. From there, I made props at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, followed by a brief gig at New York City Opera before coming home to California and pivoting away from theatre and into practical visual effects. That was in 1991. Since then, I’ve been an HTML developer, a graphic designer, a Flash designer, an art director at a major movie studio, an author (twice), a podcast host, and a painter. I also taught Photoshop at a photography school in Southern California. In fact, that was the last job I ever had working for someone else. I’ve talked about the diversity of my career before, but I think it’s worth reiterating here, if for no other reason than to see the full context of it all again for myself. I sometimes forget how much I’ve done and I end up beating myself up for not having done more.

For the past several years, I’ve primarily identified as a painter, despite the fact that the most consistent work I’ve done is writing. That said, lately I’ve had the uncomfortable thought that I might not want to paint anymore — at least not the way I’ve been doing it. Not because I’ve lost interest entirely, but maybe because I haven’t lost it enough. I can pretty consistently make paintings that “work” on some level, and honestly, that might be part of the problem. I don’t want to make things that “sort of/kind of” work, for me or for an audience. I want to make things that engage and excite me and right now, that’s not happening. And if I’m being really honest, it hasn’t been happening for quite a while.

It used to be that if I came up from the studio with my hands covered in paint, Adrianne knew it was a good day. Now, it feels like it’s become something different. More routine and repetition, less discovery and transformation. A typical studio session goes something like this: I go down into the studio, put on my apron, and pull whatever colors I’m thinking about using. If there’s a panel ready to go, I start with a base coat of Raw Umber Dark, which I then dry with a heat gun. Once that’s dry, it’s time for the initial texture layer, which is made with a heavy gel medium — at the moment, I use NovaColor 208 matte gel, but I’ve used gels by Golden and Liquitex in the past with similar results. It’s at this point that I feel myself sort of checking out. I use various pieces of screens, meshes, and the odd sink pad that I push or slap into the gel to create texture, but the nature of the gel does most of the heavy lifting texturally. Once the texture layer dries (which can take days, depending on how thick I apply it), I add several color layers and then the “distressing”, which is typically a layer of Transparent Red Iron Oxide that I scrub enough with a Scotch-Brite pad so that it’s mostly removed from the surface, but stays in the little nooks, crannies, and pores created in the texture layer. I finish the piece with a couple coats of varnish and it’s on to the next one. And that’s been the routine for dozens of pieces. Base coat, texture, color, distress, varnish, repeat. It’s as if this version of painting has become predictable enough that it’s no longer feeding me. And if discovery is where the joy lives — either in the process or the outcome — I’m missing the mark. I don’t know if the answer is to stop, to change constraints, or to break the process entirely. But I’m starting to suspect that simply repeating something that works isn’t the same as being engaged by it.

I was talking about this with my friend Duane and he said that for him, creativity moves in seasons. “There are times of harvest and fullness and abundance,” he said, “and then there are times of wintering — periods of quiet patience and dormancy. The best part about having multiple interests is that while one interest might be hibernating, you can pivot to another that might be in Spring. It’s not that you can’t do all the things, it’s just that you can’t do all the things simultaneously.” That really hit home for me and I think it speaks beautifully to exactly what’s been keeping me up at night — worrying about why I can’t seem to do all of the things.

I think the big question I’m sitting with right now might not be “do I still want to paint?” but rather ”what would make painting feel exciting and maybe even a little unfamiliar again?” That could mean a different medium, working at a different scale, or introducing different constraints and abandoning what I’m “good at” on purpose — so that I’m more of an enthusiastic amateur again rather than a seasoned professional. Sometimes the thing you’re skilled at needs to be broken a little before it can surprise you again.

I was talking about some of this with my therapist in our last session, and she asked me if I had a sense of when I was happiest in my creative practice. I didn’t have to think about it for too long. I told her without a doubt it was when I was drawing all the time. I used to draw constantly, starting when I was very little. In fact, I still have some of my first masterpieces that my mom saved. By the time I was in junior high and into high school, I was burning through sketchbooks doing my best at emulating my heroes, which at the time included artists like Chuck Jones, Disney’s Nine Old Men, Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, and the Brothers Hildbrandt, among others. She pressed me a little and asked why I thought that was the happiest time. I told her I think it’s because that was the last time that I was really making just for me. As I got further into high school, I was still drawing and painting, but it was for class assignments more than for my own enjoyment. Then same was true for college. I was still enjoying making, especially in college when I was introduced to so many new materials and techniques, but all of that making served something other than “because I want to.” After college, any making I was doing was for a job (the vast majority of it, anyway). And like I said, I was still enjoying it, but the purpose had changed. She said that it sounded like the process was only part of it and that at least some of the joy came from exploring new materials and ways of making that were a bit unfamiliar, which I absolutely agree with. I got a few jobs on the back of insisting that I knew how to do one thing or another that I actually didn’t know how to do at the time but was confident that I could figure out and made it my business to learn it and learn it well.

After hearing all of this, my therapist gave me a homework assignment. She invited me to spend at least 15-30 minutes sketching every day for the month of May. No rules around subject matter or what kind of pencils or pens I use. “That’s not the point,” she said. “I just want you to sketch non-stop for 15-30 minutes every day.” Today is May 5th, which means I’ve only got a handful of sketches done, and I’ve got to tell you, they aren’t very good — certainly nowhere near what I used to be capable of. But that’s not the point either, and thinking they’d be anywhere near my best work after years away is its own kind of trap. In fact, I posted sketch number three on Substack over the weekend alongside one of my costume renderings from college and one of the people who follows me commented with a very sage piece of advice. She wrote, “You’ll get those muscles dancing again. Be kind and compare your work to a week ago instead of when they were fittest.”

A couple of months ago, one of our neighbors gifted me a 3D printer, and since then I’ve been immersed in a world of possibilities that feels, in many ways, like a return to the prop maker I was in my twenties. I’ve printed a handful of objects, but the fact that it requires its own skillset means that I’ve also jumped back into 3D modeling, which is something I stepped away from about 20 years ago when I went freelance full-time. Two decades away means that there’s some rust to shake off, but those skills are starting to come back. In some ways, it feels like the technology has finally caught up to things I was imagining back then but had no way to realize — I’m just continuing a sentence I started 30-something years ago. Aside from the illustration homework that my therapist gave me, I’ve started drawing objects and scenes that I’d like to build. What’s really exciting is that I’m able to use the decades of experience and creative practice that I’ve accumulated to bring a unique aesthetic sensibility to the objects I design and print.

I think taking a break from painting feels like the right move at the right time, especially with these other skills and explorations surfacing the way they are. I may come back to it eventually, or painting may simply become one of the tools I bring to the 3D work — applied to robots, dioramas, or imaginary scenes that wouldn’t exist without everything I’ve learned along the way. Either way, nothing is lost. It’s all just waiting for the right season.

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Thanks for reading.

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