The Fine Art Blog of Darren Daz Cox

The title of this post comes from a comment by noted art therapist Liz Beck who suggested that kids tend to give up on art at this age due to "the realization that there are better artists in your class than you, so why bother?"

I remember that point in my life, pre-pubescent, aware of girls but not feeling any pressure to chase after them, taking my family situation for granted, starting to really appreciate music and fiercely wanting to be a good artist. but no thanks to the school system that tried to tell me I was of average ability. My best friend was Richard Winton and he tended to draw vehicles and the ‘cross section of a vehicle or head-quarters building with bonus action’ genre which is similar to an opened up doll house, but obviously a lot cooler.

Richard’s brother, Edward aka Wod, was an artist too, in fact he was the best artist I had ever seen, which is saying alot because I had been to Florence Italy and read Jack Kirby/Stan Lee comic books! Wod had a keen imagination as well as a confident art style. Have you drawn comic books with a ballpoint pen? You don’t make mistakes!

It wasn’t a competition, not like school where they would give you a C for your best effort, we just accepted that Wod was the ‘best’ as we would whomever was the best at sports. Me, Rich, Wod, my sister Sonja and our friend Mark Elliot all collaborated on the first of a series of spontanious sci-fi graphic novels that Me and Wod continued. War was the basic theme,  our generation had grandparents who had served and tv glorified WWII as it glossed over the aftermath of Vietnam.

I remember what we drew, it was pretty horrifying if you didn’t know how utterly innocent we actually were. Bullets flying everywhere, heads exploding, severed limbs, corpses, various stages of torture and the loss of sanity.  Years later I was the main artist for my high school newspaper and somehow managed to have a full page sci-fi comic with a similar anti-social theme. 

I was thrown off the paper by religious fanatics pressuring the school to do so after they noticed ‘eata featus week’ wriiten on the t-shirt of a character in my comic. The gore and smoking and alcohol drinking characters somehow went unnoticed! Ha! I was a punk kid but the editor should have been fired not me, I’m a rock star! Deal with my glorious eccentricities! ~Thanks to Nicola Aaron for being as cool now as she was then!~

There’s a lesson to be learned here, namely that no one bothered to explain to me why what I did had offended people, they simply kicked me off and that was it, nice and clean. That didn’t stop me from drawing but eventually I outgrew drawing violence as a source of pleasure.

What strikes me most about the suggestion that kids give up on art around age 11 is that,  to me that was the pivital moment in my life, and now some 30 years after that point I can’t think of anything more important to my ongoing happiness than sticking with art.

Art by Darren Daz Cox formerly of SDME+RCC (Sonja, Darren, Mark, Edward plus Richards Comic Company)

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Originally posted 2008-01-18 09:49:43. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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