Introducing Zach Bosteel...

I don't want to seem cheap or anything, but I wrote this on my blog the other day and I'm not sure I can write it better.

" am 25 years old. This July I will be 26. I was an actor for most of my young life. I did at least two plays a year, community, school, professional or otherwise, from the fifth grade until two years ago. Or three now, I guess. Through high school, college, and my professional career, it actually averages out to four plays a year. It was a huge part of my life for most of the time that I was turning from a child into an adult. There were, understandably, a lot of parts of my identity that were inimically tangled up with what I did and how well I did it. Which made me utterly unable to do it professionally. I did not have a level of objectivity that allowed me to deal with failures in that arena. And like any field, a theatrical career is full of failures, and, more significantly, perhaps, compromising successes.

In the midst of deep introspection, totally unhappy with my artistic pursuit, feeling like I was letting down my friends and family who had expectations for my acting career in addition to totally failing myself, I began drawing again. Dredging the canals of my imagination, turning it all into what had, as a youth, occupied an even greater portion of my imagination than acting. Illustration, comics, and mythology. It has been a long, cathartic road, realizing that I had spent my life and entire school career (unless I go to grad school, which feels unlikely) studying something that I didn’t want to have to study to finding a something I had always been passionate about in addition to truly afraid of.

I am smart. I always got good grades. Acting was, for me, pretty easy. This made failures especially riling, because it was always the fact that I wasn’t trying hard enough that was at the root. But most of the time, I didn’t have to try hard. Conversely, though I may have had some advantage over other five year olds in the realm of art, I lost that edge long ago. I am, generously speaking, an average artist. I see objectively in my more successful work an unexpected aptitude for color selection, but if I have any natural advantages in this field, that’s where it ends. Everything else that I do right, or close to right, has been absorbed the hard way, through tens of thousand of truly crap drawings, to the level of only sort of crap drawings. And I have loved every minute of it.

It feels like failing. But it feels like failing up. It’s hard to really feel like I’m failing when, even though I’m not great, I’m better than I was. Because I look at drawings from three years ago, and I SUCKED. Fantastically. And I can see what I’ve learned in the drawings now. And I forgive myself what I don’t know, because I’m getting a late start on all of this. I only know as much as I have taught myself, which is extremely liberating. Like a freelance illustrator, I am my boss. Or more specifically, my instructor. I have to determine the methods by which I learn the best, I have to apply myself, produce the dedication to create the assignments and then complete them. I fail all the time. And every once in a while, I succeed. I have a feeling I’m doing everything the hard way, the wrong way, but I also have a feeling that it’s valuable to me because it’s my way.

Right now, I make my money working a non-creative day job that rankles me at the best of times. But it pays bills. I have the liberty to study my interests in the off hours. I’ve even started to make a little money off of illustration projects here and there. I just got engaged to my beautiful fiance, who’s been with me for these last very challenging six years. We are shopping for a condo. We will turn part of it into a studio where we can each pursue our creative careers. We put in an offer this last weekend, but it got rejected. Another upward failure, because now we know what putting in an offer is like.

My day job is an upward failure, because even though I’m not doing what I want, I’m using the money to push me closer to where I can do what I want.

I think, honestly, from the outside, a true creative professional (or anyone, really) might look at my life and think it a mediocre, unfulfilled existence. That I’m floating along, halfway in between a lot of things, with no guarantee of them lining up in the future. But one thing I learned from failing at what I thought I would do only to find joy in failing at what I didn’t think I would do is that the rewards in my life are simply where I choose to see them.

Here is a very simple way that I apply this idea to my artwork. Everytime I look at something and see that I’ve done it wrong, have I failed at doing that thing? Yes. Sure. Undoubtedly. What I created was not what I set out to do.

But is noticing, knowing that I did it wrong a failure? Absolutely not. It is a success. A success of mental evolution. It is the very mechanic of auto-didactic success. If I have learned that lesson, will I do it wrong again? No! At least, not in the same way.

Everybody says appreciate your failures. I say remember that SOMEBODY has to teach you what you don’t know. Might as well be you."

Really interesting Sam, how we went mirroring directions in college. Nothing quite like the real world to let you know what really makes you happy and what is just something to do.

Anyway, thanks for sharing, Sam. I think your life, as you describe it, is pretty inspirational, and something to aspire to in and of itself.