I’ve been trying embroidery for a few weeks. The gentle seeds sown by Pinterest, filling my feed with picture after picture of all manner of stitching, finally took root in my imagination. When I looked at the free tote bag The New Yorker sent to thank me for forgetting to cancel my subscription, I was struck with inspiration.

I watched some videos, I looked at some diagrams, I bought supplies on Facebook Marketplace, and basically just went for it. And it’s going okay! I’ve successfully used the two types of stitches that I learned to make a reasonable approximation of flowers and stems. I’m feeling pretty chuffed about it.

And the thought has crossed my mind, “Oooh, I bet the people would love to see this. It is just so pretty and they will be just so very impressed.” I have an Instagram account where I do occasionally post art that I’ve made, so I’d have a place to put it. (Will I share the link? Maybe at the end… maybe not… it’s like a choose your own adventure except I’m the one choosing.) But every time I go to share something there, I hesitate. I’m not trying to turn my doodles into a side hustle. I’m not selling stickers or prints or accepting commissions. I’m not developing a brand.

So why do I still kind of really want to show you what I’ve made?

I wrote a paper in college making a claim about the “the highest purpose for art.” Nowadays I don’t think I’d even attempt to pick one highest purpose—frankly, art is too mysterious and broad a thing for anyone to really define, let alone rank its possible motivations. But I had to claim something, so I claimed that the highest purpose of art was to foster human connection. If you see a work of art that connects to something you’ve experienced, you feel less alone. If the art someone made articulates something you’re experiencing better than you can, you can share that art to connect better with others. Or something like that but with more Tolstoy quotes.

I’ve been drawing my whole life and in high school started to paint a bit. I’ve used charcoal and pastel and conté and ink and acrylic and gouache. I’ve made portraits of actors, my brothers, and my cousins’ cats. I’ve drawn cartoon birds saying obscure vocabulary words. 

I can’t say that in any of those I attempted to capture much of anything about my experience as a human or connect with anyone else’s. If someone is “connecting” with something I made it’s usually because it made them chuckle or because it was a painting of their cat in a cowboy hat.

So maybe I’m trying to disprove my own thesis. At least for me, the highest purpose of the art that I do, the reason that I keep wanting to make marks and lines and shapes, isn’t to foster human connection. Maybe that would be the highest purpose cosmically—the purpose that, if that were the reason you were doing it or the benefit it were having, would be the highest—but I can’t say that it’s ever been my purpose.

I should say that I can only call myself An Artist with the meekest possible body language. I don’t think of myself as an artsy person. I don’t dress very daringly and I tend to trust institutions. But, technically, I have made art and I regularly feel compelled to make more. I’m very rarely trying to capture a complex emotion or experience, but my brain does need to make a thing sometimes. Art is a different gear I need to shift into every once in a while otherwise life feels flat.

So even if I never shared any of what I make, I would still feel that frisson of excitement when I dig out my box of random sketches from years ago and see the things I made. The making of the thing feels good and the looking at a thing that I think looks nice feels good. 

Not quite Tolstoy, but I stand by it.

So, will I share a picture when I’ve finished be-flowering my swanky tote bag? I’ll have to ask myself why I want to. The easy answer is because I crave attention and affirmation and the little boost we all feel when we get notifications of people’s appreciation. There are 8,000 articles out there about that particular brand of high my brain is craving. 

But I hope there can be other answers to that question too. I know I like it when beautiful or interesting or clever art trickles its way onto my screen (Art But Make It Sports is my current favorite) and I hope that, for some small niche of people, my weird cartoons have a similar effect. 

Geoff Dyer says that art should “honor the dead, delight the living, [and] make the world a safer, nicer place.”

I hope I delight some people. I know I delight myself.

(Okay, fine. Here’s where I post my art. My hamster brain can’t resist the possibility of affirmation but I promise that’s not why I wrote this.)

Christina Ribbens

Christina Ribbens (’19) graduated with a major in history and minors in studio art and data science. After working in campus ministry for a few years, she’s getting her master’s in public humanities at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. She has a benevolent dependency on tea, is always down for a game of pick-up basketball, and would love to have you over for pancakes sometime.