Friday, June 21, 2013

The Case for Being an Artist.

This is why I want to make art and sell it. Well, there's no one reason. There are several of them which I can go into another time. First and foremost is that I love creating art. It's what I always wanted to do since I was 10 years old, teaching myself how to draw. There's an elemental charge that goes through me when I'm drawing and it's flowing. Like many artists, I hit stuck patches when things don't go as well, but I've realized that making art is about course corrections, much like life. We move forward, we stumble and fall, and we get up and keep going. We (hopefully) learn from our stumbles and get more accurate, more true to our vision.

I wanted to be in business as an artist because I think it's an amazingly cool way to make a living, and I'm constantly intrigued by the people who are able to succeed at it. I've come to realize that if I'm going to succeed, I might be well served to watch and learn from what they do. I do not believe that it's just luck or predetermination. I want to do what works. But I also feel that more than ever in this country we are experiencing a critical breakdown of deep thinking, of contemplation, of awareness and of a sense of meaning, and it's infecting everything from our media culture, to our public discourse, to the way we do business, to our sense of civility. I believe that if you learn to observe and appreciate art, live with art, be it drawing, painting, sculpture, film, or great writing and literature, you're more of an awakened person. A more conscious person. And this has practical value. You might slow down a bit, not just race through life without ever noticing it, much less living it.

It was Henry David Thoreau who said that he wanted to "suck the marrow out of life" and that he didn't want to come to the end of his life and realize, as he said, "that I had not lived." You can almost hear the emphasis on that last word. I've said earlier that in our culture, art has been if not devalued, then certainly undervalued, and that has impacts for our society and our life as a nation going forward and they're not at all good ones. I wrote recently about the blistering pace of life as our technology races ever forward, ever it seems, ahead of us. That's one of the impacts. Anyone who deals with operating systems for computers (and unless you're off the grid, that's ALL of us) feels this on some level. Art, living with it, creating it, being a part of it, almost by necessity makes you pause and become aware of something you might not have been prior to that moment. Art causes you to be in the moment, yet it's not asking that life around you should stop. Just you stop. Pause. Just for a moment. And it does this by being something that makes you want to pause. Stop. Just for a moment. Look around. Really see. Really hear. Really check in with your self. When was the last time that happened? It's been a while, hasn't it?  Look how crazy off-the-rails things have got since the last time.
Hello, stranger.
Where've you been?

The ironic thing to me is that in the 1840s when Thoreau wrote and published Walden, he had the idea that life was going entirely too fast and that people were missing it. He'd hardly feel at home here in the 21st century. He'd probably...go off the grid. Permanently. But here's the rub: some artists like and need to retreat to recharge their creativity and their souls. Then they end up staying gone, and we miss their singular gifts. For example, JD Salinger, the author of The Catcher In The Rye, pretty much vanished into thin air after that book came out. He lived a reclusive existence in New Hampshire and no one knew he was even alive until he gave his last public interview in 1980. There was talk of legal squabbles more recently. Publishing rights and so on. Then, he died in 2010, having published nothing new since 1965. That's kind of a shame. During his time out of the public eye he continued to create, and there is apparently a trove of finished work that hasn't seen the light of day and may never see it. More's the pity.

My point (and I do have one) is that, silly as this sounds, beyond the rush of creating, I like to think being an artist of any stripe has value in this world, particularly at this time, and any time an artist succeeds, that's a win for us all in my view.

Now, is my view the truth? I don't know. But I think the evidence is out there, and who doesn't think that we don't need more "conscious beings", as a friend of mine put it, walking among us?

And while we ponder that, maybe someone can tell me where the hell Meg Ryan has been?


More Later

KCD





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