VK Lynne's Self "Sketch" Shows Us Everything

There's a weird thing about fine art that if the artist is too good at their craft, they render themselves redundant. Those who are able to create hyper-realistic drawings have turned themselves into cameras, and while the skill is fascinating, the end result is little different than if we took a picture instead. Part of art being art is the separation between our creation and the real thing. Our truth is found in the ways we distort reality with our talent.

The same is true of ourselves, where our self-images exist independent of the truth about who we are. I've explained it before as what we see in the mirror being a reflection, an inversion, so we are never able to truly see ourselves from the perspective and in the manner anyone else can see us.

On "Sketch", VK is taking that thought in the direction of a psychological test. A therapist may ask a child to draw a picture of themselves, because sometimes a visual representation can say things we don't have the words for. We pick up our crayons, and we scrawl color across the page, tearing apart rainbows so we may bleed in technicolor. As she points out in the lines, "crayons... only see primary colors... they don't reveal the fine lines, they don't detail the shadows," what a sketch will do is give us the broadest strokes of the outline. We often get lost in the details of our issues, missing that we are painting every emotion with the same shade of blue.

You cannot draw a person. You can draw their image, but that's all it is. No matter how lovely they may be to gaze upon, or what you think the color choices and outlines of tattoos might mean, only the artist knows if the pen traced the idea properly. Even that is a lie, though, as we as artists are as blind to ourselves as anyone else would be.

The moment of clarity when we realize these things is often presented as on film as time slowing down, freezing before our eyes as the flash of inspiration outraces the world into our eyes. I like to think that's the intention as the song reaches its chorus, slowing to a half-time drum beat to emphasize the empty space we are cursed to fill, because the silence lets doubts and fears echo without decay.

Diving into a lyric is a deeper swim, because while words can also fail to capture the breadth and scope of an emotion, they offer us a way of painting with more nuance. A box of crayons may have sixty-four colors, but a busy mind can spin up webs of thousands of words, combining them in ways the hard wax in the wrappers will never blend.

VK sings, "it's time to take the words instead, put this foolish thing into the air, toss it like a dove and hope there's peace our there." Some of us never develop our skills with a crayon or brush, so we are stuck seeing ourselves in the forms we established in childhood. Words grow more naturally, and as we turn in that direction, we can both bare the depths of our souls, as well as stick the dagger precisely in between our own ribs. No one knows how to hurt us more than we know ourselves, and when VK notes how the image she drew and the picture she hangs on the wall are so very different, the need is there to shift from emotion to reason.

It's one thing to write down what will make you happy and check items off the list, another to see a picture of yourself and recognize the smile lines of life's happiness, and yet another to be able to have lived that way enough to see it in your mind and commit it to paper through art. For most of us to draw a smile with our skills, it had to have cut a gaping chasm in our faces. How many of us have been that happy?

Self-image is a bit of a misnomer, because we can never see ourselves as we are, nor can any but the rarest few of us draw our emotional truth. These sketches are an outline, the bleeding color of spotlights we aren't comfortable with. Thanks to music, some of us can learn to embrace that warmth. With the pounding drums behind her, and the pulsing guitars hitting like a manic heartbeat, VK is telling us the best magic trick we can perform is to watch that sketch go up in flames.

If you remember at the end of My Chemical Romance's "The Black Parade" how the album settles into a slower, more resigned tempo, and Gerard sings melodies that are throwing his arms open as if to tell us he's given us everything he's got... that's the spirit "Sketch" has. This is the carriage to the dark side slowing down and waiting for us to hop on board. Who else is ready to see what awaits us once black is the only color left in the sky?