WHAT MAKES SOMEONE AN ARTIST?
by James Michael Starr
I could draw from a very early age. I remember, when I was about four, drawing a
shield on the side of a cardboard box so that I could climb into a fantasy police cruiser
and be Broderick Crawford on the 50's television drama, Highway Patrol. I also remember
many of my first drawings were of revolvers. Apparently I watched a little too much TV.
As I grew up, everyone knew what I'd be. It was obvious. I could draw very well.
But, did that make me an artist?
When I was in high school, I entered the Draw Me contest to win a scholarship
for an artist's correspondence course. I didn't win, but I took the course anyhow and paid
for it with a paper route, throwing the Dallas Morning News. Evenings I sat in my room and
did lessons in transparent wash, pen & ink, and charcoal pencil.
Was I an artist yet?
I was an art major in college, worked in an art store, and then started my
career as an art director. At home I tried to paint, but couldn't. I had nothing to say.
Twenty years passed. When I was 42, I looked back. On the eleven-year, childhood
separation from my mother that even now cannot seem to be recovered. On my best friend who
doused his car with gasoline and set himself on fire while I was away at college. On the
failure of my sixteen-year marriage and the passing of youth's warm sun. And on the
rediscovery of a loving God who'd been there all along.
Now I had something to say. Now I was an artist.
Dallas critic, Jim Fowler, wrote, "Painters attempt to capture the world
around them and color the image with a little bit of their insides; artists attempt to
capture the world inside them using the images they see in the external world."
What's inside of you? What do you have to say?
- James Michael Starr
