An Artist's Poor Sadness
It is hard to describe the sense of shame I feel when I carry one of my Art Works down the main street of my small town. I wonder in quiet thoughts to myself, (as someone who will never, and never wants to be a parent) is this the same sort of shame that a parent feels as they escort a misbehaving child away from the chaos they've unleashed upon the world?
The same sun shines down on me. The same one that let me navigate and capture the images that are distilled into a finished piece. It's a Tuesday. The exhibition opens on Friday. I drop it off at the Exhibition Venue, and say goodbye to a frame I'll see again in seventy two hours.
A frame that many other people will see again in seventy hours. I frame that I will see them seeing, and hope that my creation will not be lost upon the shores of their Friday afternoon.
I park in the same spot. This time, the sun is weaker, and I'm wearing a button up shirt and much nicer pants. It is Friday. I want to make a nice impression on people. I've had a busy day. The gym, the groceries, the hardware store, the front garden. My back hurts. My quadriceps spasm in complaint at being forced to walk unencumbered down the main street.
I'm early. I'm always early. I like being early. It gives me time to think.
I sit, quiet, and meet one of the other artists. We walk up the stairs. I almost immediately fall up them. Bloody legs. Bloody back. We look at the art work. We speak in hushed tones of our passions. Others arrive and join us.
We stand at the back of the room, listening with interest and making quiet introductions of one another as more of our kind arrive.
They talk of the history of place, I am anxious that Art has no place.
I shake a new hand, and we get a mention. It isn't the last hand I'll shake this night.
The doors are thrown open, and it is "party time". There's friends, there's wine (no thank you, for me, I'm no longer a drinker) - and the hushed tones erupt into the exact sort of conversation you'd expect for a Friday afternoon.
But this one is different. There's people in the room, and they're more than the sum of their labels and post-nominals, if only I could remember mine. The sun is still bright, hanging around as an unwelcome guest in the Western sky, forcing people to dance around in tight circles as they mingle from group to group. Shielding their eye contact from sun's invasion through the large westerly window.
I see old friends, I see strangers. I make new conversations with new people and think, that perhaps, I have made new friends. My work hangs on the wall. I encourage people to interact with it. I chat with them. They are fascinated by the idea.
For the majority, and for myself, sadly, Art is never a commercially viable exercise. Artists are so rarely paid for work that is commissioned for an event or for a show, and that's a shame, because Art, like performance, presenting, programming, or pouring someone a drink is work.
Hard work. It is hard work because it explores big, grand, philosophical ideas that have swum around in the oceans that smash their waves against my neural matter and cognition again and again. They're ideas that are stuck in the splendour of an unfathomable swell, and they long to be unfurled onto the land, where they can be claimed and hung upon a wall, writhing with meaning.
I suggest, not verbally, but in size small font that the work can generate an income, by stating "Pay the Artist". I refer to me, but there are so many others like me.
I speak with another, and they explain how they spend every moment away from their real work, or sleep working on their craft. They practice and yearn for the moments of quiet solitude and lament that they do not fear the joy of their flow state more. They defend their time fiercely and are sad that they must leave for work.
Their painting, if it can, watches them as they leave.
We're all dressed in our lovely bits of cloth, obtained from merchants, made by craftspeople who were paid. They were not paid their worth.
So far as I know, not a single artist made a penny, we left the room as no poorer, no richer monetarily, but wealthy with ideas, kindred spirit, and the bonds that only creatives can form with one another.
Private views, I had to stop going to them, an opportunity for a party (paid for by the artist who isn't getting paid), liggers spilling out on to the pavement, noise rising, neighbours flicking their curtains and tutting. Better to go first thing in the morning, maybe the artist is there, looking hollowed eyed, but most have not had their first coffee and leave you alone to absorb. Sometimes I want to buy, but it clashes with my minimalism, my desire not to own and carry and curate and store, wondering about the effects of light, humidity, small insects. And selfishly, I want only my things about me, not the accretions of a million artists. Can we pay in HBD? Can we contribute to the commonwealth, the milieu where art is made? Can we pay the artist?
It cannot be purchased, it is an act of conciously creating ephemera, with an option for payment. Not a physical object, but a representation of a concept being presented as (future) loss. The closest I've ever come to Roland Barthes beautiful work, Camera Lucida, through my own work.
Yet by achieving that experience of, like Icarus, flying so close it, I feel the melting start. :)
So through experiencing the loss, I gain fuel for the next piece.
Do people think about the fact thay when they see a concert they're paying for the memories of thay moment to be put in their head? Im not sure, but that's how I'll approach experiences going forward. :)
At least you'll get some rewards for THIS beautiful piece of art.
Marvelously well written, and thoroughly enjoyed.
Thank you.
They will roll into the existing ones, and I too, shall reward others.
The reward in the post mortem of creation is a desire to create more.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ybefowpua3ozngxswkjkyfom/post/3lzvmivmkms2h
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ybefowpua3ozngxswkjkyfom/post/3lzvmivmkms2h
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Neat, didnt expect that to cross share, but cool! :)
I guess the fact it's a different kind of transaction helps the poor artist continue to create. It's a time honoured story isn't it, that artists are never compensated for the joy they bring us. It's also bonkers that mass produced art on Temple and Webster can be so saleable and all it does is look vaguely pretty and match boho decor in ordinary houses.
That sort of art is decorative and completely inoffensive. The real stuff makes people shudder, afraid, and keeps them awake at night. I'd love to see T+W sell that. :)
I think the world would be a kinder, more vital place if that were the case.
I think you've summed up here the culmination so many of the feelings I have about art as a craft I love but long since abandoned on the grounds of: being too time poor, not being good enough, it not earning an income, cheaper to buy mass produced (now AI can do it all anyway as well), self indulgent and the list goes on.
Art is one of those things that falls into the domain of displaying your wealth. You only have the time to create it when you are in a situation where you aren't spending every waking hour trying to survive. The next step up is that you have done so well that you have enough riches to waste money on things other than immediate needs and can display your wealth by purchasing art, beautiful garments with excessive fabric and jewellery; basically art that decorates you.
Being able to do art is often dictated by whether there is someone else who deems your work good enough to be willing to support you and gift you that time to make it. Or, as you allude to, have a job that allows you enough time to do it when you aren't working.
Thank you, and it makes me sad that Art is considered a luxury, instead of a core activity of the human experience. There are so many things that we do not necessarily "require" which are shoved down our throats, because they serve to make a lot of people a lot more money than the others.
I perhaps remain delusional enough to hold onto my cameras (the economic value in them is gone) - but I know that If I got rid of them, I'd want to get them again some day.
So I look at them, through the closed cupboard door, with contempt - and that gives me another idea for another a post along the same lines of this.
Not necessarily "hating" my desire to create, but hating the "lack of impact it brings me".
@topcomment
It's strange to think that just in our lifetimes alone camera evolution evolved to point and click, commercial film developing through to digital cameras on phones and editing apps that can make anyone look professional (to a point). Now they may as well all be in museums lest we forget. The closed cupboard door seems like your personal museum for all your equipment. It's like a nostalgic hobby now.
Looking forward to your further thoughts
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Qué triste, injusto, incomprensible. El artista debería poder vivir de su producción artística y contar con el tiempo necesario para trabajar, su trabajo verdadero: el arte. Cuando hubo el mecenazgo, alguien le pagaba su "sueldo" por trabajar su arte y así debería ser y debería haber sido. Pero hasta eso fue injusto. Porque entonces el mecenas con el cuento de que era el que pagaba cohartaba la libertad del artista.
Así nos encontramos con Miguel Ángel "protegido" por los Médici.
Él amaba la escultura pero sus mecenas le encargaron pintar los frescos de la Capilla Sixtina, obra que demoró 4 años en estar lista. Cuatro años dedicados a pintar no lo que quería sino lo que le asignaban y si quería dedicarse a esculpir no podía. ¿Acaso un artista se beneficia con un mecenazgo así?
Solo un artista puede entender a otro artista, la gente del común no va a entender su trabajo, su necesidad de crear. Es fuerte la situación del artista. El de ayer y el de hoy... Ojalá haya una realidad diferente para el mañana.
I hope too, that tomorrow will be different, but I am anxious that I will not sell any artworks at my next exhibition which opens in about a week. I'll get to feel the same sense of shame - only hanging 15 works instead of 1 :)
One of my former bosses from the UK who was also high up in Target in Australia said to me once. "You Irish hate a compliment. You are like the Australians." I found that funny in a way when you say you feel shame bring your art places. And I so know what you mean. I know and you know that there should be no sense of shame but yet there it is. We are complicated animals. I wonder if Michelangelo ever felt the same. I would say so but yet he is the most celebrated artist in the world. Which one were you in the picture?
Clearly, I'm the bloke in the oil painting. I'm being crucified by the first t, in Artist. My beard dies on the cross.
😂😂
The fucking post should be hung up as well ya big legend . Probably priceless
Well more than 14 bucks anyway
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Cheers lads
I think my glitchy brain only academically understands the concept of shame; maybe it was projected in the annoyance that I felt in situations where I think shame was supposed to be one of the reactions, but there have been many more occasions where apparently that's what I was meant to be feeling and I've just been lizard staring at someone knowing that I'm meant to have/they're expecting some kind of reaction but one isn't forthcoming and I don't always know which one to put on (this has actually been extremely useful dealing with narcissists and lesser attention seekers, they seem to get extremely frustrated when they can't get the reaction they want or any reaction at all).
And people wonder why I have imposter syndrome, the boys and I really feel like massive actors so much of the time XD
Do you have imposter syndrome? Is that why you don't like hauling your work around in public?
Sad that you didn't make any money but glad that you had some good conversations :D I think the biggest problem is the misperception that art is "easy" and anyone can do it well (literally anyone can actually do it).
I absolutely do have imposter syndrome.
Shame in my view is the opposite of pride. I'm not proud to carry the frame down the street, to stand alongside the work to "strangers" (on the street) and say, I made this, whaddya think?
Because the level of academic mud I've put myself in to give it context and meaning may not be as elegantly executed by the finished piece. The meaning not distilled enough.
Well it doesn't sound like you're saying anything and in the eyes of a stranger you're equally likely to be some guy that bought that piece of art and is taking it home as the guy who made the piece of art and taking it to an exhibition or back from the framer's XD
Interesting flip. Would I be comfortable carrying it home, if I was the purchaser? ... Probably not! Buy would I be happy to show people that I invite into my home the work? Absolutely yes.
So conflicted.
Maybe it's just because carrying a decent sized frame down the road is an unusual thing, would you feel that uncomfortable if you were carrying your average bag of shopping or if the frame was small enough to fit in your backpack? Would it be the same type and level of discomfort if you were carrying a new flatpack piece of furniture? :D
I think I'm similar, if you're silly enough to ask me questions about my project in a very casual setting and conversation I'll talk your ear off forever if I have a starting point but I think I would freeze up and die in an exhibition setting with random strangers asking me stuff x_x