Ancestral Background, Belief, and Personal Expression

 

I could have entitled this as “What Does It Matter if My Father were a Baptist and My Mother were a Catholic?”  Another could have been “What is the Artistic Meaning that My Father’s Lineage was Northern British Isles and My Mother’s was Southern Italy?”  

(By the way, in my drawings here of my parents, my mother’s hair was dark but I just didn’t fill it in when drawing.)

Neither of these titles would get to the nub of what I want to note and both may lead one into another direction of either belief or ancestry, and those would be too narrow.

Instead, I am trying to figure out if there is any meaning at all to my own artistic expression and my upbringing and heritage.  Do they all work together?

I suppose that I can claim they do work together since, after all, here I am drawing particular kinds of artwork and everything I’ve lived through so far has led to this moment of artistic expression. 

That would mean those expressions necessarily connect to my past as well as looking forward to my future, but that is also a presumption that my art is a clear and direct understanding of those moments.  I cannot assert, however, that it is the case simply because I may not have perfect comprehension of my life.  What can I affirm?

Of course, biologically my ability to coordinate perception and making marks on paper comes from my parents, and surely family, school, and experience shaped that ability too.  Whether the drawing is an unequivocal result of those factors is another question, but something of those life events likely remains within the visual interpretation just as they are present in nearly everything else that I do.

Does this mean that there is always a direct line between personal history and the artistic outcome?  I don’t think so, since what I want to present may not be anything that my family would ever have guessed or it’s obscure that my experiences would have led to that inevitable reaction.