300(ish) Words on Drawing Alone at Bars
The Great British Baking Show is not often touted as a source of personal revelation; a vehicle for carbs, sure, protection against an otherwise cruel world, perhaps, and certainly some weird, subtextual commentary on yearning for erstwhile empire—but maybe not a case for the emotional alchemy of marzipan (fondant notwithstanding). Still, whenever I binge GBBS in an effort to ameliorate my depression symptoms for forty fucking seconds, I’m struck by an under-discussed aspect of the show’s premise—vanguard amateurism. The participants are charming because they’ve got the chops to be professional bakers, but none of the formal training.
They all have jobs and discrete identities outside of their baking practices, and it’s clear that, for most, creative cakery amounts to the sort of limitless nerd impulse we usually associate with cosplayers and the like; the primary interest is exploration, not upward mobility. This faux-democratization of skill might make the contestants feel relatable to couch-denting audience members like myself, but that level of unheralded, productive dedication is actually fairly foreign to the average joe or even the everyday hobbyist.
Monetizing interest is also a distinctly American past-time; it makes sense that a program as self-consciously British as GBBS casts thematic fascination as praxis rather than hustle. Regardless, I sometimes feel a twinge of insufficiency when I watch these shiny architects and chemists find the time to pursue blissfully pointless passion projects. I’m not a person with hobbies, really, and at a low point in the summer of 2018, I added this worry to the sloppy pile of anxieties that tends to accumulate at the center of my chest. Was I lazy, or worse, boring? I’m a visual artist, and like most artists, about 50 percent of my waking hours are consigned to applications, studio time, and concerted attempts to advance my “career”, such as it is. I also have two jobs, an assortment of freelance gigs, and a penchant for blinding hangovers, which regularly cut into mornings I could otherwise spend, I don’t know, collecting baseball cards?…Scrapbooking?
Most other creatives I know don’t have hobbies, either. Maybe a therapist prescribes knitting, or SoulCycle becomes a bracingly Caucasian form of catharsis, or weekend tarot readings start to feature more prominently at parties, but more often than not, sleep, booze, and exhaustion-induced inertia win out where free time is concerned for most of the sculptors and painters and poets I’ve met.
In a moment of particularly pathetic introspection, I asked myself a gross question: what do I actually like to do? I mean, other than painting, which can just as easily send me into an existential spiral as it can prove fulfilling or fun, or drinking, which, you know, same. I read pretty ravenously, I write all the time, I watch hella documentaries about scams, I can plan a bitchin’ night out, but…none of those are hobbies, strictly speaking. I asked my sister what the closest thing I had to a hobby might be, and she answered in a flash—sketching at bars. Lame but true, and pretty on-brand.
There are few joys outside of drugs and love that give me satisfaction close to that of nursing a Tom Collins while fooling around in my notebook. A comfy stool provides an island inside a maelstrom of interpersonal gales; first dates, team drinks, break-up bitch-fests, the sloshing downbeat of major and minor chords scoring lives I’ll never touch. I mostly draw bodies, weird ones, forms unbecoming and improvisational, both. The vast majority are sketchy exorcisms of my frontal lobe, but when they’re good, they take a conspiratorial approach to our shared burden of embodiment, this big, inescapable meat problem that defines our modes of being. I draw about sex and hope and bad politics and good intentions. I doodle in the margins of myself. Art-making is often a lonely experience, one that requires space and seemingly abyssal silence to take root, but when I’m mulling over the proclivities of people in pen, I want to know what people do, how people touch, where exactly their inhibitions end.
What better location for that inky inquiry than Tuesday night happy hour? I enjoy solitude free from asceticism. I meditate through frenzied bustle rather than fetishize its absence. Concentration is replaced by second-to-second response. I can actually relax. Outweighing the myriad interruptions by ugly men with no manners are small incidences of tenderness, too; a bartender pushing a candle closer to my Shinola, a girl eating dinner alone rustling up the courage to bond over pens. Hobbies are optional, I’ve learned. No one really needs one if there’s passion afoot, but whether you’re working with both or neither, I recommend the singular delight of drawing by yourself at a bar. You might get to watch somebody fall in love.
Torey Akers is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. She likes short walks to the bar and is picky about pens. You can find her on Instagram and on her site here.
