My Name Is Iden | The quiet between
- Published: February 4, 2025
I was trying to make something pretty. I was trying to make something colorful, something light, something uplifting. I would have even accepted funny or irreverent. I was aiming for anything that I could maybe sell.
The piece laid out on my work table was none of those things.
This picture was dark. There were skulls, and tears, and the only color, beyond black and white, was red. Blood. The only color I had found was blood. I went looking for “light and hopeful” and found only “heavy with despair.”
This art wasn’t even a cry for help. It was a scream. So was the one next to it. And the one next to it. Ten pieces I created that week, ten attempts at “pretty,” and I stood there looking at a row of ten screams. Do you know how hard it is to sell a scream? Not all of us can be Edvard Munch.
This is a frustration that has twisted around in me since I first began working as a professional artist. I feel more things than fear and sadness. There is more to me than pain, but you wouldn’t know it just glancing through my portfolio or walking through my exhibitions.
The struggle for me isn’t just that I create work with limited commercial appeal. It isn’t really about the money. Don’t get me wrong here. I like to be able to pay my bills as much as the next artist, but what I want more than anything is to communicate how I feel.
I share my work because I want to share myself. That is why I started making art in the first place and staying true to that will always be a pillar of my creativity. I have already said that Iden is more than her scars and tears. So why can’t I do it?
Why can’t I make happy art when I am happy, or colorful art when I am feeling colorful? I can be uplifting. Sometimes I can even be funny. Don’t even get started on irreverent! I am all those things every day. So why am I surrounded by all of this screaming?
I’ve put a lot of thought into this, and I may finally have an answer. To explain this to myself, I’ve had to do a bit of that subjective time travel we call “remembering.” The “why”s of today always seem to have their “because” stuck firmly in yesterday. So, please, follow me backward a few decades
I was a pretty sad kid. I was a pretty lonely kid and, honestly, I was a pretty angry kid. All of that was for a lot of different and complicated reasons that aren’t actually relevant here. What matters is that I learned, really quickly, that our society was not one that tolerated “negative feelings.”
If an adult thought you were upset, they tried to fix you. They wanted to know why you were upset and why you couldn’t get over it. If a fellow kid thought you were upset, they just left you alone. That environment disincentivizes displays of sadness or anger. I didn’t know why I was not happy, I didn’t know why I couldn’t get over it, and I didn’t know why nobody could understand that.
Some kids like me ended up banging their heads against that system until they were broken. Other kids learned to hide that side of themselves. I was always free to be happy. It was always safe to be colorful and funny. I was never free to cry. It was never safe to scream. So I hid those things I was feeling and that worked, for a while.
It’s been a long time since I was a kid. I have learned a lot about the world. Most importantly, I have learned that a thing hidden is not a thing silenced. I had stuffed a lot of screams away into the deep corners of me over the years and I was running out of space.
Each new buried pain just inflamed the old. I had to find some safe way, some safe place, to scream. I found art.
What I create isn’t pretty. Sometimes it isn’t even easy to look at. But that doesn’t mean that there is no beauty in it. What I create is not an easy sell. That doesn’t make it worthless.
People are complicated. We laugh, we love, we hope but, we also cry. We bleed, we despair. We scream. All of that is beautiful. All of that is priceless because all of that is human.
I think that, from now on, I will not try so hard to make things that are pretty. I will, instead, allow my art to be what it was always meant to be: a scream. A beautifully human scream that I can hang proudly on the gallery wall, and if that is all anyone sees of me, then I can be OK with that, because that me deserves to be seen. But if anyone is curious to see it, I will be exhibiting my other side — the pretty, colorful, occasionally funny and consistently irreverent side — every day in the same place and in the same way I guess I always have. That me can be found in conversations with friends, in games played with my kids, in the space between the lines, in the quiet between the screams.
P.S. If you would like to buy a scream, let me know. I promise it will make me smile.
*The author is an artist and writer. She lives in Yellow Springs with her wife and three children. You can follow her work at http://www.mynameisiden.com.
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