Friday, March 1, 2013

What if we don't make it?



That painting is a good one. You are sure of it. So you post it on Facebook and immediately begin refreshing your browser every thirty seconds hoping for the Like's to start rolling in. Ten minutes go by. Only two Likes and no comments. Damn. You check the time and realize all your friends are probably still at lunch. Bad Facebook timing. You should have waited til 2 o'clock, when everyone is back in front of their computers, but they are drifting and distractible, no longer completely engaged by the demands of their afternoon.

Half an hour later your computer chimes and you dash out of the bathroom with your belt still undone. You've got seven Likes and three comments. Whew. You may not yet be Earning Big Money, but now it seems at least possible that you are not a failure.

The creative temperament has endless triggers for self-doubt and a constellation of worries: What if my prices are wrong and nothing sells? What if nobody goes to that site to vote for my song because it's two clicks away? What if I never get that book contract and end up self-publishing, and only sell a handful of copies to my friends and the co-workers who feel obliged? Why the hell am I doing this?

It's a cruel fact that in an era when the output of blue-chip artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons is traded by the global One Percent as an esoteric futures commodity, that so little money actually changes hands down here at the "emerging" artist level. My own anxiety about never making a decent living from my artwork forces me to rely on sleep aids more nights than I'd care to admit. And yet by some standards I'm making it. I've got a couple of buddies who claim I'm living the dream. Why? Because I quit my career and am selling art for nearly unaffordable prices at a grown-up gallery. And because I have my wife's blessing. But if they knew how few paintings actually sell, or noticed that I've been wearing the same pants to every art opening for six years (thanks to the style longevity of Brooklyn Industries), I would drop right off their list of enviable persons.

Like most anyone reading this, I'm a drop in the bucket now referred to as the creative class. A demographic ghetto of dreamers slogging it out the best we can, pouring other people's lattes, building websites, seeking a tolerable work-life balance that keeps our little creative flames kindled just long enough to draw one more picture or write one more song. We make art because we don't know how to stop. Or because our critical reasoning just isn't that good. Or just possibly, because it saves our lives.

My friend Dylan Scholinski runs an art workshop called The Haven Youth Project that seeks to prevent suicide through creativity and self expression. Many of the kids that go through his program are hanging onto this life by a thread. For them, the transformative power of creative expression is essential to their survival. I try to think of this when I get bogged down by the cynicism of the art world, or when a client takes too long to pay.

I can't say art ever saved my life, but I doubt I could live without it. It's been a refuge since I could hold a crayon. It's also been the only thing anybody ever wanted to pay me for. I sold my first drawings in fourth grade. Some kid noticed I could draw, and he paid me his lunch money every now and then if I'd make pictures for him. He would stand over my shoulder and say, "Put a horse over there. And a barn. Can you do a tractor? Good. That's enough. Now don't sign it!" Turns out he was taking the drawings home to his parents, claiming he'd done them. Before long, word came down from on high that these commissions were to cease. I didn't ask questions. But by then the word was out. Kids knew I could draw. Toward the end of that year I was forced by a bully to do pornographic drawings of Peanuts characters. This bully had already beat me up once, so when he said "Draw a picture of Linus and Lucy doing it," I did. But at age nine I was fuzzy on the mechanics. It was hard enough to draw cartoon characters correctly with their clothes on, but to imagine them naked, with adult sexual organs and in positions I wasn't clear about, was a mind boggling creative challenge. Perhaps the hardest of my life. The bully was there to help with the details. The only thing I thought to say was, "Shouldn't it be Charlie Brown instead of Linus?"

You'd think this assignment would have been humiliating. It wasn't. On the scale of childhood woes, it was way down on the list compared to getting beat up. I took it in stride, and delivered the work. I should have known from those early experiences that I'd do well in advertising, but it didn't become clear for decades.

By the time most of us have decided to make a go of a career in the arts, our heads are filled with ridiculous tripe about what making it means. The metrics for it's measurement, the bohemian fantasies we indulge, the value we place on this or that achievement are all contrivances that will turn on us when the work stops selling. When the world says "meh" to your latest show, inevitably some form of the question "What if I can't make it?" will cast its shadow across the work you thought you liked.

At some point you may become aware, or you may decide that this is the wrong question entirely. At the risk of sounding moralistic, a more useful question is something like "How can I better serve the talent I have?" It may seem old fashioned to think of your creativity being saddled with any sort of obligation. Who would you be obliged to?  In a recent interview, 86 year old singer Tony Bennett claimed the secret to his career longevity was commitment to honoring his talent. Years earlier when he had "gotten into the drugs," Bennett was warned by Lenny Bruce's manager that he was headed down the same path as Lenny, because he was "sinning against his talent." Tony got clean and stayed that way for five decades. In this frame of thinking, the artist's indebtedness is fundamentally to his or her own talent, rather than that talent being something the artist exploits.

The idea that artistic giftedness bears witness to creative forces beyond ordinary human enterprise is persistent across time and culture. Rumi was onto it, so was William Blake, and so is that kid next door flailing away on his guitar in his parent's basement. If creativity is something that can be tapped into or channeled, then it demands a certain respect, if not reverence, and it follows that those of us who have access to it should approach it with discipline if we wish to have it make a regular appearance in our studios. I don't mean for this to sound romantic or mystical. At it's most stripped down, this obligation is about being in service to your own curiosity, and to pursuing it with rigor.

When I was a kid, a friend of mine and I wandered the banks of a river in Kentucky one afternoon. For whatever foolhardy reason, at some point we decided to weave little rafts from dried sticks and leaves, which we waded out into the river with, then lit on fire. We held them at arms length until the flames were well established, then launched the blazing crafts into the swift stream and watched them steam and smoke their way over the rocks and riffles until they drifted out of sight and were presumably destroyed by the river, since the woods around us never erupted in flames. We stood there in the river for a long time. Later we didn't talk about it. It would be years until I encountered the word ineffable, and when I did things started to fall into place.

At the end of the day we all have to make our best guess at what artistic success is going to mean. Attempts at values-clarification and living intentionally, or honing your own personal "brand" may get you part way there. Facebook Likes aren't meaningless indicators either. But success is a moving target, and we'd best be comfortable with the directions changing when we are halfway there. One way or another, I'll always throw my lot in with curiosity and the pursuit of the astonishing. It may be a little old fashioned to be guided by such transcendental values, but in some way I seek to invoke them in everything I create. My best hope is that each painting I make will be a little flaming raft disappearing around a bend in someone's river. It's a goal anyway. I may not ever Earn Big Money, but I'm all in with this journey.