![\"](\"\/the_old_gate.jpg\")
<\/p>\nAnother one of those MySpace surveys came around my friend’s lists, and it got me to looking back into my past…a risky thing as I think I do that far too much as it is. The survey was, "what were you doing ten years ago, compared to now", and it ended with a question: "looking back, are you where you thought you would be…?" I decided to rephrase the questions on it, to compass 10, 20, 30 and 40 year time slices of my life. Looking at the answers I gave, one thing stood out pretty starkly: 1986 was not a good time in my life. But then I knew that.\n<\/p>\n
I entered the 1970s figuring I would end up making a living as some sort of graphic artist…either a painter and possibly political cartoonist, or a photographer who produced other graphic art on the side. But I was sure the artist’s life was for me. All my life until then I had been painting and drawing, as though from some inner hunger to get my feelings out that I could never really explain. I was, and am, painfully shy, so any notice my work got always led to embarrassment. But I had to do it. By the mid 1970s I was comfortable enough in my sexual orientation to make a few tentative forays into the Washington D.C. gay scene and try to find myself a boyfriend, and hopefully a lover. Of course, being a shy little dweeb was a bit of a handicap in the dating and mating game. But it was also not good for an aspiring artist either. You have to promote yourself, and I was just happy to get any sort of notice at all. So throughout the 70s I had scant little success at either an arts career or in love. But I wasn’t worried. I was young, and the future seemed infinite from where I stood. Except it wasn’t.\n<\/p>\n
I entered the 1980s having lost all track of my dreams. I was single, lonely, with no prospects for any kind of graphic arts work, and utterly unsure of what I was going to do with my life. I figured I would end up spending it mostly at the poverty level, hopefully somewhat above the starvation level. But my dreams had all fled. My dreams of finding success, or at least a place in the world as an artist. My dreams of finding love. In the 1980s I found myself staring at the fact that probably none of it would happen for me, and without those anchors in my life I began to drift aimlessly, and then hopelessly. <\/p>\n
My artistic output actually shot up during the 80s, but it was the storm before the quiet. My head was a mess of lost dreams and longings, desperate hopes and dark, very dark, musings about life and existence. I did a series of charcoal and ink drawings on the theme of First Love, which was mostly done out of hopeless longing. But it is still some of my best work…<\/p>\n
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The Old Gate<\/em>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For every finished one I still have tons of rough ideas sketched out that I’d like to finish someday…<\/p>\n I wasn’t sure as I sketched this one out whether the couple was standing in front of the one’s locker, or going though a door. I have tons of these gay male couples in love sketches…<\/p>\n …this couple was to be in the middle of a field of tall grass. It was all longing. I even did a few comic strips, where I tried back-handedly to keep my spirits going…<\/p>\n You can see the little Bag icon I used to sign my cartoons with here. I did a few self portraits…<\/p>\n …that’s a broken picket fence I’m leaning against. The little dot in the sky is supposed to represent the sun in the distance. The sun figures in a lot of my oil paintings and at the time I sketched this I’d thought of doing a self portrait in oils. But I never got around to it, or to ninety percent of the stuff I sketched out. By the end of the 1980s my head was a despairing mess. I had a bunch of other self portraits in my sketchbooks by then, and they were ones I kept well away from family and friends. Like…oh…this one…<\/p>\n You’ll notice I called it Still Life With Better Medium<\/em>, but in retrospect I think the better title is Self Portrait With Better Medium<\/em>. It’s kinda mottled and smudged because the sketchbook I used had cheap, lousy paper in it that’s begun to seriously decay (which is why I’m scanning this stuff in now…). Then there was this one…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I was hurting pretty bad. But at least I could dump it all into my drawing and painting. For a while anyway…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My sketchbooks from the period are all like this. One minute it’s all aching darkness, and the next it’s beauty and love… <\/p>\n <\/p>\n One Heartbeat<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n …and by the end of the 1980s I’d just gotten sick of it. I stopped doing artwork. Everything. I just didn’t want to be in that part of my head anymore. I didn’t want to deal with my feelings. I just hurt too badly. It is the ultimate irony of my life, that I have a decent living, and my own house now, because I just had to get the hell away from my feelings.<\/p>\n I turned away from my sketchbooks and my easel, and my cameras and began to fixate on the little personal computer I’d built for myself. I discovered that writing software, computer coding, allowed me to be creative in a purely intellectual, logical way. I could create these little tightly logical algorithms that didn’t involve my deepest emotional state at all…it was pure right brain. There is art, trust me, and beauty, in code. It was a safe place for me to be creative. A place of pure logic and intellect and no feelings at all, save for the joy of purely logical elegance and beauty. For the next several years I did nothing but computer programming, which I came to enjoy immensely, and found that I was good at. Before long I was getting work doing it, as the PC revolution began to build steam. In ’91 I became a contract software developer, making more money then I’d ever dreamed. I went from one contract job to another, building my skills, gaining experience, and getting a little more money for it each time I got a new contract. Then I got the contract at Space Telescope. After working for them for a little over a year as a contractor, they offered me a staff position, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. That was in 2000.\n<\/p>\n Since 2002, slowly, bit by bit, I’ve begun to reclaim my artistic side. But it’s still difficult. There is a lot in there that still hurts. So I apologize for not being as regular about putting up my cartoons as I’d like. I am not as professional grade as I’d like to be, yet. Maybe I’ll never get there. Sometimes, like just this past couple of weeks, the door just slams shut….and I can’t. But I am trying. I want it back now. At least, thank my maker, I still want it. All of it. Love, beauty, art, the rapture, it’s all mixed together and I can’t live without it, even single. Maybe I’ll never have a lover. I can’t imagine going though life without someone to put my arms around, to put their arms around me. But I can’t stay so out of touch anymore with my inner self. That time at my drafting table…and my easel…I want it back now.\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Another one of those MySpace surveys came around my friend’s lists, and it got me to looking back into my past…a risky thing as I think I do that far too much as it is. The survey was, "what were you doing ten years ago, compared to now", and it ended with a question: "looking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"](\"\/artwork\/goodby-kiss.jpg\")
\n<\/p>\n\n![\"](\"\/artwork\/by-the-light-of-day.jpg\")
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