Art, Living, and Living with Art

by Jess Petrella

I’ve convinced myself there is meaning in art. The honest human reflection, the voiceless voice, the eye’s untamed lover, the romance and secrets of art. I obsess over it. It has become the most important thing in my life. I’m addicted to genius. I’m addicted to original thoughts, concepts, philosophies, by way of art, literature, music, cinema. When I find something honest, I cling to it, I stare and I ruminate the meaning of it. If the maker is interesting enough, I obsess over the maker – the artist. I do this all in wild waves of guilt – I’ve over indulged, I could be saving the world but instead I’m dancing on the clouds, and I’m unapologetic. I had no idea this would happen.

For the first 17 years of my life I was unable to perform my roll as an artist, let’s just say my mind was not yet introduced to what I would be doing for the rest of my life. Although, I knew the need already, I understood what I felt I’d like to express and that art would be the only way to do it. I held onto my childhood imagination in instinct – I would need it later in life. When I look back at my younger self, I remember the confusion very clearly. A hyper active mind made me very nervous, and I didn’t know what to do with the images and ideas that I kept generating. I couldn’t draw, I couldn’t paint, I was terrible at arts and crafts, and didn’t have the concentration for story writing. I had ideas in my mind, though, and I knew what I wanted to do with these paints and that paper but the ability wasn’t native to me. School was supposed to promote these skills, but instead school bored me to sleep, and I got horrible grades because of that. All of this didn’t matter, though, because I had things to express and I would have to find a way.

I’ve written and kept journals since junior high school, and when I read back I’m baffled by my analysis of my world and self (was I ever naive or was I just born jaded?). My journals are proof that I was overly aware of everything I wanted and needed to express; I’d write descriptions to drawings I wish I could make, or plots to stories I wish I had the attention to write. To be totally real, it bordered on pathetic. I had, and still have, no natural talent. Why would I pursue a vocation that didn’t choose me?

The camera is a device. It’s a machine I learned to use. It had dials, and buttons, and mechanisms that my mind could wrap around. I had eyes, I had a camera: I made photographs. All of a sudden I didn’t need to draw, or paint, or write, I just needed to take a photograph. At age 17, I discovered self expression. I started off very awkwardly in my approach to taking photos, I had zero content or subject for a long while. I photographed what I thought looked like art, with no reference and no guidance. There was one summer where I’d visit the one-hour-photo weekly, sitting on the curb in the hot sun, waiting for my rolls of film to be developed. The process of shooting a roll of photos and then waiting for them to be developed felt like a fix for an addiction. And if that was so, then photography was my gateway drug to all art had to offer me. I struggled, and still struggle, with the purpose of my images. Little did I know that word “purpose” would haunt me for the rest of my natural life.

I’ve only just begun to “get it”, and to understand how to translate my language into my work. I’ve written before that I suspect everything I’ve done up until now has just been practice, and that’s become very real to me in the past few months. As my mind becomes more vivid, and the purpose of my work begins to mature, I feel constantly reborn with each personal limit I transcend. As a result, I live abnormally. I see very little for what it really is, all I can see is what things can be: a photograph. My “world” could easily appear distorted to others, and it may be, but it’s mine and I’m as comfortable in it as a womb. My reality is not a shared reality, I know that well now. I haven’t yet found the right way to say this through my work but I hope to. In a lot of ways it has nothing to do with art, I just needed a medium. But it was the “art” which I became obsessed with and now here I stand, up to my throat in it. I’ve been consumed by the machine and refuse to be spat out.

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