English 11B

This artistic reflection on the book Run Wild is about the main character, Jiang Cheng, and how he overcame the isolating loneliness of a new world and no one to support him. It features the start of the book after Jiang Cheng has gotten off the train to this new city, the train station is completely run down and empty. He sits there completely alone, all he has is an address and his father refuses to answer the phone. It's his lowest point and all he has now is to climb the steep hill back up. I did it on a graffiti wall, because just like this memory this artwork will be covered up with other memories.

Ever since I could remember, I’ve been drawing. The first time I remember drawing was when I was only 3 years old. I remember seeing this “tornado” drawing on the front of a sketchbook. In hindsight I think it was just an example of how pencils drew on the paper, but at that time I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. So I tried to draw a tornado too, but it came out as more scribbles than a smooth cylindrical tube. I was so upset that it came out wrong, so I went to my father for help. 

I showed him the picture, but he immediately went, “Oh! I love it!”

I knew he couldn’t “love it” . It wasn't what I wanted to portray, it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it too. I argued back “No, you don’t! It looks awful!” That was the first time, I knew for a fact, someone had lied to me so I wouldn’t be upset, from then on I stopped showing off my art. What’s the point of showing when I’m most honest, if the person in front of me is going to lie about it.

The next point I could remember showing someone my art, it was my mother, she had seen me drawing by myself.

“Oh that’s pretty neat, you’re good at that,” she had said. “You get that skill from our side of the family, we have generations of artists,” but what she didn’t say, was that none of them pursued it, it ended as a hobby, even if they’re national treasures of New Zealand and featured in many many museums “but just remember, whatever you do, you cannot be an artist when you grow up.”

That’s how it was, it was just a fact, all artists ended up on the streets without any way to make food. I never questioned it, I just accepted it. This followed me until my first year in highschool, I had been planning to go get a nursing degree, knowing I’d always have a job and money to feed myself and put a roof over my head. But gosh darn if I didn’t just hate everything about it, it was boring and it dragged on and on. Then I found out we had an engineering course, 4 different classes you could take over the span of your highschool life, I took the chance and signed up for them. I finally felt like I belonged, not only did I get to work hands on and do lots of math and calculations, but I could draw, I could use this skill deemed completely “useless”, for even though I never got support for it, even if I was told there was nothing I could do with my art, I drew every single day, for years, I was top of my art class every single year, I had started making money off of it with commissions. And now this thing I had been told was useless my whole life finally had a purpose a use, I started designing things, a box to hold my crochet hooks, a fold up scrabble board, then I got into automatics, we started with gear ratios and building miniature cars, and it was the start of my favorite subject. I want to pursue something worthwhile that I love. Because art isn’t just a skill for others to use, but a way to express yourself, release your emotions and get sucked into the process. I couldn’t find that with anything else no matter how much i tried, and there’s no other way I want to spend my time. Art is the language that every human can understand if you’re good enough, you don’t need to teach people how to understand it, they just will.