the timboucher experience

Juggling is not something you can fake. Inability cannot be covered up. A drop is a drop. A neat trick is a neat trick. If you can juggle four balls, you’re automatically a better juggler than somebody who can only juggle three. If you can juggle six clubs, you’re better than a five club juggler. It’s dead simple. That’s one thing I like about juggling as an art form, and its an aspect of juggling which I’ve since been able to go back and apply to other art forms I once admired, but lost sight of. My year spent at a fine arts school in Baltimore was, by no means, a lost year. My time was spent well, expending the full creative energy of myself, and refining my abilities in the fires of the forges there. But my second year, my drop-out year, that could have gone better. I see that now.

Something happened in art though, as a movement. Modern art, I don’t want to pin down exactly in history where it drifted away from this… it doesn’t matter. But it used to be that if you could paint realistically, you were it. Is your draftsmanship better than the guy next to you? Then you’re a better artist, period, because you’re representing things as they are. A badly drawn hand is a badly drawn hand. I had teachers in art school who certainly adhered to these principles, but in retrospect, not enough. Being young and brash, I wanted to break all the rules before I learned them thoroughly and made them mine to command. I wanted to run off and do that modernist or postmodern or whatever thing where you run out and express yourself or… something. And you don’t need to be able to draw a realistic human figure and you don’t need to be able to mix paint colors, etc etc. Or applied to another realm, you don’t need to learn how to play that guitar your mother bought you, you can just fiddle with knobs and pedals and create this wash of purely expressive-emotive sound. I mean, that’s all well and good, but it’s exactly that mentality which lead me ultimately to stop painting and playing music for over five years. I just reached this sort of breaking point, a wall which I simply couldn’t get past, no matter how much I struggled emotionally to express myself, leaping over inner hurdles left and right. I just exhausted myself.

While it can quite expressive and beautiful, juggling is so concrete that it can become mind-numbing to that inner creative voice which wants to stand up and shout. The last thing that voice wants is to be put under the shackles of learning how to execute an exact physical motion by drilling it hundreds and hundreds of times in a row. That’s where you’ve got to learn how to find some kind of sick joy in the academic processes of repetition. That’s what I learned from juggling.

• Louis Wain’s Schizophrenic Cats
• Stained Glass Stuff
• Dreams of painting the sky
• Your Tap-Dancing Ancestors…
• Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting