"Withheld Memory"

I've worked on this particular piece of art over and over and over again. I initially drew, painted, and colored it for my first year at Sakura Con (you can revisit how it originally looked here - note that I have two edits of the same piece in that post) as a piece of original artwork to bring along mixed in with my collection of fan art. I was inspired by sakura blossoms (cherry blossoms), which the Con is named after, and wanted to create some original artwork that would reflect me as an artist as well as show the Japanese influence of my work. I wanted something that felt a little more serious than I was able to achieve with anime, so I ended up doing a piece that wasn't anime. That felt very brave.

But when I was putting the piece together visually, I ended up treating it like it was an anime piece. I was focusing too much on keeping it looking like the presentation of an original character rather than letting the visuals tell their own story.

In my original work (that has nothing to do with anime or fan art) I enjoy playing with shapes and lines and usually incorporate them with illustrative elements to tell an abstracted visual story. Much of my original work is digital and I haven't really done much to build the body of it in a few years - not for any particular reason, more I think because I've been invested in improving my other artistic skills than just free forming with what I enjoy. For some reason tonight I thought of this piece and opened it for the first time in a long time. And I just did some free forming. I let the visuals figure themselves out.

And I renamed it and think I can finally leave it alone. Because I think it's finally a piece of original art, which is what I had intended all along.

This piece is now titled "Withheld Memory." The kanji/hiragana written on it - 言わぬが花 (iwanu ga hana) - literally translates to: "Not speaking is a flower." It's a Japanese proverb about both the beauty of silence and the wisdom of withholding.

This is finally art. I think you can only understand the achievement that something like this is when you're an artist struggling to find your voice, reworking a piece repeatedly without success. When that success finally and unexpectedly comes, it's a landmark all its own.

~m.d.