I'm probably getting the story wrong, but my mom recently showed my current art to someone I went to high school with (I don't talk to anyone I went to high school with so I guess she's my liaison) and they responded with surprise..."That's what he's doing now? He needs to go back to what he was doing in high school. THAT was what he was good at."
That story got me digging through my piles of art to look at what I was supposedly so good at when I was 15. I was lucky enough to have an art teacher who let me do what I wanted and gave me access to a full range of art supplies. I wasn't that angry, but all my friends were so I spent a lot of time trying to come up with something edgy or with a hint of violence, like the red smears on the otherwise pretty basic study above.
But when it came down to it, I wanted to have a certain amount of humor in what I did. Sometimes it was a dodge to distract from anything personal I might have put into my art, but usually it was just to make myself laugh. (A note on the painting above - I didn't actually finish it, my girlfriend at the time did. I learned that I don't have the attention span for oil painting.)
So I signed my name as an "A" for anarchy and made silkscreen vampires, but while my friends were carving ankhs into their skin I was making sure that the vampires were having the best time an undead parasite could.
Honestly, bright colors aside, I see vampires like the one above as much bleaker than any that I might have drawn in high school. I think the biggest thing for me right now is that I've been working in a consistent style for almost a year, which is by far the longest I've stuck with anything art-wise. Maybe I'll paint something violent soon, for old times sake.
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