I've had a model or two in progress for maybe 25 solid years and almost always with a build log on some forum or other. Perhaps I just need a break.
I wrote that yesterday, in a thinking aloud, relaxed, chatty state of mind. Twenty-four hours later, I find it to be absolutely true for me.
From the age of about eight until I needed to be cooler to attract girls at fourteen, I made maybe a hundred models. Between 18 and 27 I built half a dozen to pass the time in barracks. After I got married I began to take it a little more seriously, to the horror of my wife who didn’t realise that I had an inner nerd. (We didn’t know each other very well, I initially believed she had human emotions. Ha!)
After the divorce there was a long period when I was too busy with gaining a part-time degree, raising children and a full-time job to need a hobby, but in 1998 a work colleague gave me a model Hawker Hurricane as a secret Santa present. That was 26 years ago and since then, I don’t think I’ve ever stopped modelling.
At first I built them on my own, then I joined a local club, and then the Internet arrived with forums like this. I enjoyed the writing as well as the modelling and the hobby became all consuming. I can’t tell you how many models I’ve made since that Hurricane. I don’t actually know because they all blur together. It doesn’t take long to make a plastic kit of an aeroplane, or a tank, or a ship so the total must be in the high hundreds.
They blur together in my memory because essentially it’s been the same thing over and over again. I open the box and there’s chaos inside. I solve some minor problems on my own, read some books, copy what everyone else is doing and eventually organise it into a model of an aeroplane or a tank or a ship. It lives on the shelf for awhile becomes dusty gets broken and is thrown away. Then I do it again.
I’ve made a few wooden ship models now and they do take much longer. They seem to be more appreciated by the casual viewer too. But even so, plastic or wood, it’s the same old thing - a combination of a three dimensional jigsaw and painting by numbers resulting in a smaller copy of the real thing, whatever it was. So many copies, so little that’s really my own creation.
I’ve modified kits, even built a few from scratch. Ive always tried to make my models slightly different from the other thousands out there. I’ve built dioramas and tried to tell stories in plastic, but despite all that, I no longer see it as a creative way to spend my time. It’s boring me!
I’m only making the model to have something to write about and I think my writing is becoming boring too, and not just to me but to you all as well.
Modelling has been a brilliant pastime for me. It’s a craft and a hobby that I have enjoyed very much over the years. But is it art? Is it art? No, of course it’s not.
That’s a way to make a model of a boat that qualifies as art and it’s so far beyond what I do with a model kit that it’s not even in the same solar system.
Nope. I’m going to finish Alert (because I want to finish modelling on a high) and then walk away from this hobby. The thousand hours a year I’ve been spending on it can be spent in much more fulfilling ways making music and writing stories. What might I have achieved in 26000 hours of practicing guitar or writing for publication? And what did I get out of all that modelling, all that writing?
The polite and well-meant, though largely insincere, approval of strangers.
But then, what do I know?
