Sabotage and the Beauty of Creating

Something kind of dawned on me today. The last couple of nights I’ve spent time working, drawing things of the usual sort and having a damn good time doing it. The feeling was/is healthy.

And I was thinking about comics and how I cannot figure out why I can’t get any of them done. Then today I thought about artists I really love. Bode in particular, but also Frazetta and others. None of them are associated with strictly delineated projects. They aren’t Bode’s Project A, they’re just Bode’s art. The world they build is not a detailed secondary fantasy world (so-to-speak) but an organic thing that comes into being spontaneously out of what the artists actually do.

Well, I have been doing that too. When someone contacts me about my work they never seem to speak of specific projects or worlds…they always ask about my art, how I do it, what I’m working on, generally stating that they like what I do, etc. They respond to the art I do, not necessarily to the specific content.

So is it possible that I’m sabotaging myself by obsessing over compartmentalizing everything I do into this or that “world”? Am I making it harder or impossible on myself by refusing to allow my chocolate to touch my peanut butter?

I thought about all the little stories and ideas I have laying around – some with images attached, some with scripts, some with mere doodles and noodles – and I realized that so many of them are simply not exclusive. By simply wading into these ideas and just doing them would I be allowing the – pardon me for saying it – “West World” to take shape naturally, rather than trying to engineer it from blueprint to real print?