When art imitates life
Piece from the series ‘Windows Soul’ by AJ Rogers
In 2018, I decided to re-explore my artistic side that somehow remained in my childhood. I was at a point in my life where I needed to feel like I had some direction and purpose but mostly to add some novelty to my life. Art, at that time, seemed to be the most reasonable outlet for a suppressed creative. I enrolled in an introductory art class and came face to face with a larger-than-life, gentle giant whose artistic capabilities were simply out of this world, this galaxy, even. AJ Rogers at 27 years old is a professional mixed medium artist, who started off as my nurturing art teacher and later grew into my lifelong artistic advisor and collaborator. Our encounter was the first step on my artistic journey that demanded that I explore and channel my artistic skills using life and its ever-changing ideals and values as my main source of inspiration. This meant that I had to always be in a learning mode because as has been uttered throughout the ribbon of time the phrase ‘ the only thing constant in life is change’. For me to be a good artist, or at least to be able to use art in my life as I had intended, I had to create with the expectation that I would never stop learning.
In one of my favorite Port of Spain Tedx Talks of 2016, Trinidadian Photographer Maria Nunes, on speaking about the evolution of culture said: “...young people who are the living bearers of culture and they are not seeing culture only as something to be presented but something to be continually reimagined because culture is not fossilized, it’s alive, it’s living.” Culture in Trinidad and Tobago is sometimes presented by creatives through their artistic renditions of life in the form of carnival costumes both in the traditional and modern sense. Since the bearers of culture are living beings, growing and ever-changing humans then it stands to reason that culture or as I apply it in this case, art, is a living thing and is prone to constant change and growth.
I remember drawing beach-themed comic strip-styled stories as a child and looking back I now realized why. For most of my childhood, my immediate family lived a very simple lifestyle. Everything I got or owned was out of necessity. We did not own a television but we lived very close to the sea. Colouring books were a luxury that only came as gifts from friends and family, few and far in between. However, as a child, I saw the opportunity to colour the comic strips found in the newspapers and colour them I would. At that point in my life, those comic strips and the simple, beach life were my points of reference. Like AJ who said “as a kid, I drew cartoons and things I saw on TV…” Hence, the reason for my plethora of comic strip drawings with stories of living by the beach amongst the coconut trees, sand, sun, and sea. These were the things I knew and experienced.
“When I started learning more about art as I got older, about the masters of art, for example, Da Vinci and Leroy Clarke, I gained more knowledge and points of reference.” continued AJ. Fast forward to 2018, where I, the girl from the village by the beach with a childish expert-level knowledge on drawing comic strip beach stories began to dig deeper into my artistic side as an adult. What I learned and continue to learn to this day is that my art is a collective, creative expression of my experiences and the things that I am attracted to. This is what informed my artistic style. My creative expression is a blend of all the things that influenced my life from the first point of realization of my childhood to now. My style imitated the horizon of the sea, that I watched the sun rise over almost every morning, the wavy lines of the coconut tree branches that swayed in the breeze, and the squares that held the stories of the comic strips. My artistic style manifests in lines and shapes in a variety of ways showing the influence of my thirty-odd years of existence.
The Art and the Artist - AJ Rogers
“I think as people we are always changing and growing and learning so to think that...art is not affected by learning and is always ever-evolving,” AJ continued with a notion that I wholeheartedly agree with, “I think it is kind of ludicrous thing because we as humans are in a constant state of change, everyday we grow older and everytime we leave or we wake up we are changing physically, emotionally and spiritually so why wouldn’t that also happen in art and the creative way?” Building on these words, the idea of art imitating life could not have been more accurate. As an artist, my life, my thoughts, ideas and experiences will all meet on the canvas and will be brought to life with my pencils and paints. With every stroke, a part of me is exposed and you, the audience can tell who I am without knowing my name. The more I experience the world around me, the more I read, the more I observe, the more conversations I have and the more I learn is the more I will grow as an artist. The more I grow is the more I change and with each module of change, the more I can comfortably and genuinely express myself through art. Let’s raise our canvas and paint and cheer for the symbiotic relationship of our art and our life!
