So over and over again I hear this “I used to ______, but I don’t
anymore. I’m not sure what happened but
I (a) got going to college (b) started working a serious job or (c) had kids.”
Fill in the blank, painting, drawing, music, singing, writing or
whatever. Now I hear “well I wasn’t that
good”, and implication that there was not a financial future in it. Sometimes
this is explicitly stated. Now based on these typical statements I glean two
simple internal understandings. One, making Art was not a priority and had to
give way to the “real” or “adult” world.
Second, it was ended due to a lack of perceived competence but often
underlying that, a perceived inability to make this financially worthwhile.
This lack of financial gain seems to flow back to lesson one, it is not
congruent with the “adult” world.
Now this said, I can disagree with the conception that Art belongs to
another class that can somehow escape the constraints of the adult world. And
meeting full time artists (especially painters for some reason) reinforces that
they are a little “off” in a fun way.
There is an archetype in our culture of the “eccentric artist” and while
I don’t think fits the majority of artists I have met, captures this idea of
not being in the mainstream if one is an artist.
I agree that art, as an encounter with beauty and a non-rational
attempt to create meaning, is a step out of our general way of working. It breaks away from the mundane, wake up work
wash sleep rinse repeat. It is this
encounter of art that allows us to understand things we don’t like, that
challenge us, as art all the same. It
allows that art can be a simple few lines deemed poetic, a photograph that
isolates something from the everyday world and therefore elevates it,
pornography, or the singing of an ancient tune.
It steps us out of our normal understanding, at times by grounding us
back into a normal typical experience that you usually fail to really “experience”.
Yet we have herds of people that “gave it up”. These people I encounter
are defending against a sense that they were not a real artist, that perhaps
there work was not meaningful. I believe they know that pretending art could
not be a part of their “adult” life is a rationalization to cover a fear. I base this one the experience of this very
encounter. The flash of joy in the eyes when recalling a time when they used to
___. It is an experience that is not so distant.
Life is too painful and meaningless if left to its own course to not
create or participate in Art. To give up old experiences is to create walls
around who you are. It is to reject that period of life as “not me” and in some
ways as “childish experimentation”. This is an artificial moratorium on your
identity. Further it begs the question
of what one is teaching the children in your life about what it means to be a
whole person. Oddly enough (or perhaps inevitable)
I encounter the middle aged or late middle aged adult. The one that is painting again, singing
again, writing again… or found a new venue for a different art. That spot in
development when one looks back to judge ones accomplishments and for these
people, they found themselves lacking and falling short. They rectified this by
returning to creativity.
