REFLECTIONS

It's hard to be an adult, I mean an artist. Ok both. But I want to write about how hard it is to be an artist, or is it? Ok let's just go with it...it is.

Although a BA Fine Art Degree sits behind my name I still feel like a self-proclaimed artist, which at times have been for many reasons, none of them to do with art whatsoever. Specialising in Jewellery Design and Manufacturing was a strategic move, I didn't want to taint my love for painting by choosing a career in Fine Art through a panel of art world curators deciding on my behalf what art is and what it isn't. In hindsight, I see myself as an artist, much more than I see myself as a jeweller, it might have worked out, the Fine Art thing.

I'm still trying over here. To make art.

Digging through the archives, pondering if what I made then was actually worth putting out there to sell or if I was just being out right backing the hell out of myself to sell things that were average. I have a good laugh at myself at times, about how much I believe in my own artistic abilities because if I took university to go on alone, I should have given up a long time ago. As a jeweller anyway.

I recently started painting again. It takes time. Forgotten how to draw somewhat. That takes patience. A skill not sharpened becomes work. I don't know if I was cut-out to work, I shamelessly say out loud on a public platform. Mmm. There has also been a good dose of reality-checking, sobering mirrors being held up when you circle back to patterns in your life that for many years have kept you from the very things you are only now honest enough with yourself about to face. It sets you back you know.

Back to painting and drawing and not wanting to work. Don't gasp and judge like that, I do understand the concept of work and if we don't, the possibilities of ending up in dangerously uncomfortable situations are very real. I don't want to work, I want to play. I want to get paid to play. Ha! The audacity. But that is honestly what I want. Who cares what I want in the bigger scheme of things, yes sure, I don't know but I care. For now anyway. It ebbs and flows.

There are very real reasons behind wanting to play for a living. I'll leave you hanging here a bit and not go into depth about the why.

So, back to painting and drawing and making. I was prepping a canvas the other day. Trying a few new techniques. New things are challenging. I live in a little make-shift shack on a farm and the floors aren't so level (I honestly don't know if it's cool or borders on out right irrationality anymore) but I needed a place to put the canvas down to dry, a level area. Just to the right of the bedroom door leading into the living room forty-five degrees South-West of the fire place...haha just kidding, just wanted to go off on a tangent there. Admit it, you went along. Thanks for coming. Anyway...

The paint on the canvas needed to dry. So there it was on the floor drying. I step over it, around it, make sure I check the paint isn't running where it shouldn't. It needs to be just right. The control is out of control. Laughing out loud at this, because I even want to control paint the way it flows with the laws of gravity. Control, it's a passion killer. I find the right spot and then leave it to be. Then night falls and I stumble around in my slumber a few times. The canvas gets kicked, stepped on, dented and in the dark everything feels uncontrollable.

Does something become art when the process happens and the end product isn't so much what you planned the outcome to be or is something art because you meticulously planned it and the piece turned out exactly how you wanted it to? It's a question I haven't yet figured out the answer to. It's a struggle within I haven't been able to still because as the years have passed I lived life and made art in a way that things ended up being what they are because it didn't go according to plan. Yes of course, that makes sense but it's not what I meant. What I mean is I have always lived and made art in happy-go-lucky ways and believed it to be the most authentic way to live but those beliefs are cracking and being challenged in a big way. Now I wonder if sticking to a plan and really making it happen according to systems and the laws of gravity wouldn't have been a better way to live. Am I just not an avoidant? Tough truth to swallow, because I think it's true.

Can an old dog learn new tricks? Do I even want to? is a more important question. Acceptance and surrender are hard things.

That's it for now. I have to go wait it out at a coffee shop in the deep South for a debit card delivery that I keep on missing because of signal and well, the deep South. Adult now, art later I guess.

Fuck it. I do hate surrender.

Bye