Focus Concentration Practice

I learned to do something from a very young age because the temperature dropped in my childhood house hold: Channel. Focus. When you grow up around difficult people or very authoritarian ones which mine where: I had a escape hatched I used an it was Art.


Still is today.


You can't yell, scream and protest like a normal human so you retreat into your head. It's really very normal response. I felt lucky my whole life to have discovered art at such a young age. I might have not been able to say out loud what I felt but refocus my attention to something else. If I didn't like how unhappy things where: I'd draw pictures of happier times. Or what I wanted them to be. Or I'd listen to music that lift me “out of it”. Change my mood all together.


Instead of focusing on something I could do nothing about...


I'd go to my room at 8-9 years old, crack open my newest Disney book. Read it. Then spend a week drawing the whole thing over & over until I had a exact copy. I didn't trace. I practiced. I concentrate on it instead of my parents somber moods. It was a overly serious house without a lot of lightheartedness. I choose to focus on something that would make me happy instead. Like being able to do what Walt Disney could. It redirected my thoughts into something productive.


An much like giving yourself round of personal therapy all the time.


In grade school, I got picked on a lot because I was really shy. Withdrawn. In third grade, the class bully decided it was my day to be picked on. Picked on me because of my pants, ran around the indoor recess taunting me, so I just went down an sat at the table an started to draw Bambi from memory. He came over to the table, snatched my drawing out of my hands: Started to make fun of it, an couldn't.


Wait a minute, he said, “Is that...” all stunned.
An I said, “Yea, it is: Now leave me alone.”


Then, instead of taunting me: He took the drawing around to every kid in the class showing them what I could do. Suddenly, the little freak was my best friend. He wanted to sit by me. Ask me to draw him things. Informed a few other bullies not to pick on me anymore. Etc. Every time he'd brag on me, I'd turn red. I really didn't want attention either way but didn't mind someone appreciating the work I had put into being able to draw that well.


It felt nice to be appreciated for what you could do.


So, I kept working on it. Art. Drawing.
Focusing & Concentrating for long hours.


When, the family would sit down to watch TV at night: I'd have my drawing books open, learning how to draw a realistic horse. Or Cow. Once I had gotten that down, I moved on to drawing from pictures. I'd draw lions, tigers, and just about any animal you could think of. I loved animals. An I wasn't happy until I finally drew a monkey, that had a certain gilt in his eye. A warm glow. His eyes smiled. I didn't consider myself a “good” artist until I could do that. Convey that with pencil.


I spent night after night focused on it.


We had moved up to IL, an I had learned to kind use that as a way to keep bullies off my back. An it usually worked. When the new kids could see I had something to offer, they tended not to pick on me. It helped me make friends. I use to draw an paint things for them. As practice.


So art really was my saving grace. My savior.


It gave me a way to escape the drudgery of growing up feeling like I was living out Cinderellas life. I'd clean a four level house, I'd cook, do the dishes, counters, floors and trash. I did everything but the laundry. For some odd reason, thank god my mother never made me do that too. Weekend days where spent, painting apartments an painting storm windows. Over an over. An at night, I'd double down an work some more on art.


It kept me sane.


It kept me focused on the best part of myself. What I could do right, instead of what was not. My parents where critical people. Especially my mother. Nothing was every quiet good enough, or perfect enough. But I could go in my room, turn on some music an focus on something I was good at. Concentrate on what was right about me, not wrong.


It made me a workaholic very early on.


It gave me a way to express myself, for some odd reason my parents never paid much attention to. Even when I won ribbons and contest. Disigned Yearbook covers. It didn't matter much to me, whether I had their approval or not because others did recognize me for who I wanted to be seen as: Myself. MY work. Not theirs. Them not really giving me kuddos for it might be why I've had some mental block that I could not make a living as an artist. I don't know. It's a topic, I'll probably explore. Their in ability to say “good job” might be the whole root of my mental block about money & art.


They where just not very emotionally supportive about it.


They supplied the paper, sent me to a few art classes in town but generally bitched about the cost. So I tried not to ask for supplies to much until high school an had to. When I started painting murals, is when I got a reaction. It wasn't pleasant either. I was really into music. I really really admired Stanley Moore art on Journey album coves. I reproduced just about everyone of them on giant 4 foot murals.


He's know for Grateful Dead art too.


Journey was a pretty positive type of music to listen to actually. I mean I liked heavy metal too. It could have been worse lol but my dad went off about it. I was just learning to draw people. I was a teen, of course I was going to pick good looking guys to draw. An that's when he noticed, came down to my room tore every single poster off my walls: Screaming at me. All this! Is gonna go, he said. It wasn't okay with him. He went to grab my mural of Journey's “Escape” album cover I had painted that was HUGE. Pointed at it hostile as hell, “That can stay” an wouldn't touch it but when we moved to a new house, all those murals I did but one “disappeared”.


My mom said they where in storage.
Then said she couldn't find them.


No one every has confessed to where they went. I landed up in another high school Junior year. Which in a weird way was alright by me. I had just got done taking every art related class I could an by going to the new high school I could take another two. An I worked on faces until I moved out. Not as much as I had before. I got a boyfriend. Was a teenager. Got distracted. Got kicked out of the house.


I lost my focus on Art.


Didn't pick up my pencil or paints for years. Instead I focused on business, management, computer programming. But Art is what taught me: if you want to get good at anything...


You have to focus on it. Concentrate. Practice.


It's the biggest key to art & life to me.
Where your attention goes, you become.