Welcome to Leah and Elijah's art journal.

Hi Friends!

Last day of October- sad to see our favorite month go, but we are also Coloradans who love the snow, so... it's bitter sweet. 

It feels like it was a full month. Leah turned 29, had her soul friend Fiona visit from Oakland, started a new job at a botanic gardens in Fort Collins, and bought a wig.

Elijah went to an Ableton conference down in Denver, got a new Midi Controller (he's obsessed), got hired as a sound engineer for a local Fort Collins band, had a good visit with his friend Matthew, debuted a new song he and Steve wrote, bought a top hat, and then froze to death in his garage (it is cold in there)!

Here are some other things:

-Here is a link to Elijah's 'Soy Amparo' (mentioned in last month's newsletter).

-We did not get selected for the ArtHyve Project (explained in last month's newsletter).

-For those who are just joining in, there is an archive of past newsletters on our website here! 

Elijah's Work

Currently, I am sitting in my dining room, watching the snow hide trees and bury cars, and for the first time in a while, I am quiet. Basking in the silence that accompanies snowfall, I am silenced. 

This thing is disorienting. This artist life. 

I am incredibly lucky. I am seriously so freaking lucky that my full-time job is being a musician. I keep thinking about it, and the only word that becomes abundantly clear is grateful. 

I am Grateful.

So freaking Grateful.  

I wake up, make breakfast, and then go practice piano. After an hour or two of practice, I compose, I watch Ableton tutorials, I drink coffee, I work on my live looping rig. I am growing like crazy in all the places that I want to grow, and yet I still have days when I am incredibly sad. 

I have days when I am overwhelmed by the insecurities of inadequacy, terrorized by thoughts that I’m lazy and making all the wrong decisions. It feels like there is this anxious urgency around being a musician that everything has to be right now or else NOTHING is ever going to happen, and what are you doing if you aren’t doing it ALL RIGHT NOW?! The truth is, I am not following the formula I’ve been told to follow; I am not looking for a label, or a touring life, or to perform every chance I get.

This artist thing... It’s a disorienting life. I have no boss I can be mad at. I have this insatiable desire to create. And I’m realizing that the whole “making it” thing is nonsense. I mean, what is “making it”? A hit song? A sold out concert? A crowd singing my lyrics back at me? 

As I consider what I want, and why I create, I am shocked to realize that it is skewed towards an identity conversation. The “making it” thing is looking for self-worth, something that will finally prove I am worthy, lovable.

We are at a unique point in history in that we get to observe the “making it” identity crisis unfold in celebrity social media. We see people strive to achieve the influencer status and then watch meltdowns occur. I don’t mention this because I want to make fun of it. I say it because I am recognizing that could easily be me.

If my self-value and identity depend on some abstract idea of success and I don’t get it, or worse, I get it and then that thing is taken away… Who am I?

I don’t have some magic safeguard promising I won’t ever go down that path. the ego is tricky, and it does a good job of making us unaware of its influence. But right now, I am focusing on being present - grateful -  right now, I’ll watch the snow hide trees and bury cars. Right now, I’ll be quiet.

Leah's Work

Around when I first met Elijah, he asked if I would design album art for his album-in-progress. This project idea got bigger and bigger. Our plan was for me to create a full graphic novel. My vision for this was inspired by Shaun Tan’s  wordless graphic novel, ‘The Arrival’. This meant that I needed to do a ton of drawings. A TON. So I spent a few years slowly trying to wrap my mind around the idea and to solidify an outline of drawings. I was consistently disappointed at how little I was getting done. Then, just almost a year ago, I hit a wall and stopped doing any kind of art for months, and I was extremely discouraged and unmotivated.

I asked a lot of questions to find out why this was happening… the biggest one being, ‘do I even enjoy making art?’. That one was painful (cue identity crisis). With E’s help, I eventually realized that what I was feeling was actually a true dislike of the medium I had basically forced myself to continue pursuing… drawing.

Before this realization, I was convinced that drawing doesn’t come easily to me because I’m not good at it. I never allowed the space for it to just not be my thing. It had to be! That was the plan! I’m an artist, I should be able to make amazing drawings, right?! I convinced myself that I just had to force it out and get better in order to enjoy it and be successful. And that's what I did for those couple of years. And yet, I never got better.

I do not like drawing, that is not my chosen medium. It fills me with the unbearable frustration that comes from repeatedly unachieved expectations. I don’t have a desire to take any more drawing classes, to actively focus on this one medium to improve.  If I could take a class in a medium it would not be drawing! 

Not only do I not enjoy drawing, it’s ok that I don’t enjoy drawing. And it doesn’t make me a bad artist, or even less of an artist.  It was scary to let go of this because it meant this whole vision we had come up with and gotten very excited about was no longer for me to execute/control.

So when I FINALLY started to acknowledge all of this, I was able to get excited about art again and focus on the medium I love. Collage. And I let go of the ownership around our graphic novel idea. Maybe it won’t happen, or maybe another artist will take the reins someday, who knows!

Collaborators

Steve Rustin

Curtis Kline

Inspiration

Leah's

LorriMarie Jenkins (mixed media artist): youtube channel

Elijah's

Mattokind (musicians/controllerists): Scenescape Live

WWW.LEIJAH.ART