As the voice of experience in that hit 80s gangster movie, Sean Connery tells Charles Martin Smith that stamping his feet will keep him warm—something he learned in his 20 years of walking the beat. I haven’t been practising that long, but I guess you can’t help picking stuff up here and there that hopefully will help you ‘the next time you return to the woods’. I’ve always said every show for me was a learning experience, and that every show always feels like the first. I may’ve worked on themes and exhibited in some places more than once but really, it’s never the same experience twice and there’s always something to learn. I was asked recently if I could maybe share what I’ve learned and I thought, meow, I’m still learning, myself. But I’m thinking maybe, it might be a good exercise for me to reflect on this, so I can better remember all these things, and maybe it’ll help other people to avoid making the same mistakes I did. So, here we go in no particular order and I’ll try to keep this short.
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I can think of a zillion places where I’ve heard some variation on this theme, but here are some off the top of my head.
I also remember seeing a link to a blog post or an article over at my art class classroom where, I’m not sure if it was also by an artist? But the article was questioning like, what good are artists to society, anyway? Well anyway, full disclosure time: This post comes on the heels of that survey that seemed to cause quite a stir in the country it came out in, which isn’t mine but isn’t that far away. Or well it is pretty far away if you think in terms of how much richer that country is, eheheh. But maybe not so very far away from the way a lot of us back here also regard art as pretty much useless unless you make a whole lot of money with it. It’s that whole, how your parents freak out when they find out you want to be a painter instead of a doctor or a lawyer or the CEO of some mega corporation-thing. You know the one ^_^ Or well, it isn’t just back here in my neck of the worldwide woods, either—I read once about how this other artist in the US, I think? Said that when people ask her what she does for a living and she says ‘I’m an artist’, people go, ‘Oh…’ (As in ‘Oh dear’.) But when she went to Paris, she would be like ‘I’m an artist’ and they’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful!’ Things have been hard on everyone, lately, without exception. Or at least (unless you live a hole or somewhere super remote and grow your own food and all that) pretty much everyone’s been affected in one way or another. But no matter how hard things get, or whatever changes, it amazes me how creators never stop creating. There have been times of great hardship throughout history, like wars, pestilence, famine and natural disasters—times during which you’d think survival would be foremost if not solely on people’s minds. This naturally meant things like art would take a back seat until things got better and people could ‘afford’ to think of these things again. But people have continued creating in spite of these things. People were painting during the Black Plague and throughout wars around the world. In the Philippines, when they threw artists in jail during Martial Law, they wrote and composed and did their thing in their cells. Well, we can’t all be Monet. I’m not talking about being able to paint water lilies, haystacks or steam engine steam (although what I’d give to be able to paint like that)—I’m talking about that barn he used to have to work in. Right now, about the only dream I have left in life (for, as Eugenie says, life is an eternal shipwreck of our hopes) is to have a huge studio. Or well, even just an okay studio will do—just enough space to house all my junk (and the junk I make my junk with) and hopefully for me to make even more junk in. I don’t need an entire barn (although that would be AWESOME); I'd be happy with even just a good-sized room. Buuut like I said, we can’t all be Monet, and most of us have to make do with what we’ve got. And right now all I’ve got is more or less half a room about oh… eight feet square (a little less than two and a half metres)? My sister has the other eight feet, which I try my best not to encroach on even if she has a place of her own near where she works and is hardly ever here. There we were, my co-workers and I, sitting on the beach on a Saturday night—they, with their beers, and I with the one can of Coke I'd been nursing all throughout the evening. We fell to talking about the vicissitudes of digital marketing agency life and, the discussion turned towards the pain of having one’s hard work dissed by the client (and sometimes, even by one’s own colleagues). (I confess I do whine about this a lot.) One of my fellow writers who was, for once, actually a few years older than I was (most of my co-workers being millennials) piped up and said: ‘Being older and having worked far longer than any of you here, I can tell you, you are not your work.’ I may not have had an alcoholic drop to drink, but I might as well have had for the heat with which I retorted, ‘I have a problem with that statement’. Now, everyone is entitled to his own opinion. And in retrospect I may have understood where that co-worker of mine was coming from. Honest. But forgive me when I repeat, I really do have a problem with that statement. Read on and let me know if you agree with me, or at least get where I’m coming from on this. For some reason, swirling rainbows and smiles sparkling in the sunshine don’t seem to be as powerful images of painting or painters versus some super sad guy chopping off his ear and gifting it to a hooker. It’s true, it hurts to paint, for a lot of reasons—there’s a lot of discipline and hard work involved. You work hard and long enough, you can get burnt out, and oftentimes, however hard you work, people don’t seem to appreciate what you create. Yet in spite of all this (in the words of the immortal Mr Cougar Mellencamp), it hurts so good you can’t help but keep on painting. And when people think to ask you, it’s hard to explain why. Not that you’re obliged to, of course, but it helps to be able to articulate these things for the types who might ask why anyone would choose to be an artist in the first place. So here are a few articulated reasons why painting is possibly one of the happiest things for mortals to do. (Why everyone doesn’t, in spite of these reasons, is another matter entirely, but I guess one could look at it as a, theme park, of sorts: You can’t get in unless you have a ticket, but once you do, you run wild, have fun and you don’t ever want to leave.) Ever been in that dilemma? When you have this insane allergy, but if you took an antihistamine, you’d get all sleepy, and you CAN’T get all sleepy because you have to work? Being burnt out, but unable to take time off is kind of like that. Obviously, time off to decompress is the ultimate solution to the kind of chronic fatigue syndrome artists have, but there are times when there simply is no ‘next time’. Either you paint (or create) it now, or never. Well, maybe not never, ever, but, sometimes there’s just no moving a deadline and you have to make some hard choices. Mind, this isn’t just me: I recently came across this article about how holidays, however much needed, just aren’t an option, sometimes for burnt-out professionals in the workplace. So taking off from last month’s post about having ABS (not washboard but more like washout), I’ve got 10 suggestions that might help to tide you over. That is, until all the work is finished and ready for your (hopefully) adoring public. We interrupt our purportedly regularly scheduled blog because it’s come to my attention that I might be burnt out.
Sometimes we’re aware of what’s going on—dimly, maybe, but still—but it never really comes home to you until somebody (often the last person you expect) spells it out for you in no uncertain terms. Well, burnout happens. I have seen it happen to other people before; I guess I’m seeing it firsthand now, lol. Although I confess I didn’t think it would happen, to me or at least like this, or that things would come to such a pass. Anyway for this ‘interruptablog’ (which I’m writing instead of the quick-start guide to acrylic like the one I did for oil which I’d thought I’d do since I’m acrylicking now), I’m going to go into ‘artist’s burnout’. Specifically, burnout in people who paint, sculpt…maybe musicians, poets, playwrights, thespians and makers of velvet flowers, too, I don’t know. Which means we’ll be looking at why you shouldn’t paint (or do art in general) when you’re tired, and how you know you’re burnt out. So I’m ‘back in the saddle’, as it were—painting factory’s in full swing (at the time of writing). And having lived among humans for so very long, I’ve picked up the human habit of, well, looking for um, shall we say, sympathy or, support while I’m, you know. Painting factory-ing. And while I was bending the unfortunate ear of one of my co-workers I was struck by something she said: ‘Oh no. You have to be super inspired to work on all that.’ Now, it’s not that I don’t appreciate her time or sympathetic ear. And, I am aware that most humans don’t ‘get’ what people like me do in our respective painting factories. In fact, I’m fairly sure that hadn’t been the first time I’d heard something to that effect. However I would like to set something straight: thinking that artists live on inspiration alone is pure Bos taurus doodie. One day about ten years ago I was on my way to work (I think this must’ve been the radio station, or the bank, I forget) after I’d gotten out of art school. I don’t remember why, but I stopped at a Pancake House where I ran into one of my (literally) old Fine Arts professors (God rest him). After I’d greeted him he was all
‘So, what are you doing now?’ ‘Working, Sir.’ ‘Of course, you would be.’ —which was as much as to say, ‘Of course you have a ‘real job’—your paintings suck, so you need one.’ |
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