I don't know how to talk about my art very well, probably because I've only ever had to write about it in an academic context (yuck), but I am getting better and have taken the time to read other industry artist's personal artbooks so I can learn to talk about my art in a way that is accessible and actually meaningful.
In college I worked as a gallery assistant, and I am convinced that most (if not all) galleries intentionally use obtuse language. For what reason, I don't know. Perhaps it is purposefully exclusionary, or maybe it's that lots of academic types are bad writers that push the idea that in order for an artwork to be "smart" the statement must have "smart" words in it which results in barely anyone understanding what the artist intended in the first place. Like, in an effort to create a technical language for critiquing and describing art, (some) gallerists and (some) fine artists managed to alienate their own audiences. Such language even alienated me from my own art!
I was (and am) a more industry-inclined artist that studied in a gallery-oriented program which emphasized conceptualism and the ridiculously tedious documentation of artistic process (you can read more about that here). If it weren't for this program, it may have taken me longer to turn to digital art and realize my interest was more in graphic design and commercial/industry work rather than in galleries (though that is the best I can do in terms of being positive about the entire ordeal).
While I hate the language of institutional spaces, I do like art in itself. I took lots of art history classes (even an AP course in high school before the mess that was my college art program) and have visited (and continue to visit) art museums when I have the time. I am more inclined to digital art these days, but I've done a lot of traditional work as well (I only started teaching myself digital art after college circa. 2021) and influences on my art in terms of stylistic choices come from both gallerist and industry fields. Additionally my college art program, shitshow that it was, did sharpen my grasp on the fundamentals as well as introduced me to the concept of master copies/studies as being highly beneficial to my understanding of anatomy/lighting/composition/etc.
Unfortunately the general whiplash of my growing personal desires for my art v. the institutional nature of this art program weighed on me, and I started drifting further and further from my familiar practice and turned instead to different forms of art like video editing, graphic design, and magazine collage that didn't involve as much of a traditional hand in things. For a time, all I wanted was to dissassociate from my own art--4 years of indoctrination to art academia will do that to you. That, and the fact that my professors didn't care about anything I made. The only class that I ever really routinely impressed my professors in was printmaking, and that's only because I was good with the knives and not much beyond that.
I've written up more specific anecdotes of my college art program in my online diary, but for now I'll summarize: my college's art program all but destroyed my personal identity as an artist, and I've had to take the past few years to rebuild my skill and confidence. I'd been conditioned by my professors to believe that my art, as it was, wasn't good. And I continued to think for a long while that if my art wasn't good enough for them then it wasn't good for me or for anyone, and this headspace was not at all helped by social media's lack of actual connection and community.
I had to protect and preserve my art from pent-up years' worth of my own rage and hatred of it. It was a really strange and awful thing to have to do, because I was upset when I made art and was again upset when I wasn't making it or didn't feel like it. There were days I didn't feel like it and forced myself. There were other days that I had the motivation but quit because of frustration. It didn't used to be like this: if I made something I didn't like, it wasn't a big deal. But in an art program like mine where so much gravitas was put to process and documentation and some vague idea of attaining meaning, making something I didn't like (or, more often, something that my professors didn't like) felt like a huge setback.
It's been a difficult uphill push to regain even half of what I used to be. I can still see some unsureness in how I place my lines a little too stiffly, but I know that some stiffness is to be expected after all I had to go through. If it remains, it remains.
After largely dropping off social media and trying to unlearn the brunt of conceptualism enforced in my college art program, I'm in a far less delicate state. In a social media environment is the added pressure to have pieces perform well as determined by number of likes/views/shares/comments or whatever else which is why I greatly scaled back on my prescence on social media and reconsidered how I use those platforms (if I use them at all anymore). Posting to my social medias is now a second thought to me and I've let go of the pressure to maintain any sort of consistent presence online lmao. Though I still have to take certain measures to steel myself. For instance, I share far less of my art with my family; I know at this point in time I take things like commentary/critique far more personally in regards to my art than I used to, and I am unsure if I am stable enough to share with them as freely as I used to since I am scared that certain comments or questions they innocently pose may inadvertently hurt the progress I've made.
Currently in art-making I am prioritizing my own comfort and ease. For now I draw mostly within my zone of comfort, pushing myself if I feel up to it but otherwise learning and drawing at my own pace. Basically just returning to having fun again and re-learning to actually like the act of making art. Certainly I have my own ambitions and goals (making a pmv in the remainder of 2024), but I have no suffocating pressure added to document my process, make meaning out of everything, and/or keep up with any sort of posting schedule.
Currently most of art has to do with, in no particular order: horses, ponies, cowboys, spaghetti westerns, horror.