Feeling very lucky to be cosy and safe in my home whilst the wind and rain raged outside this week, I decided to review my year and make plans for the next one. I would normally be too busy to do this now but for reasons I will not doubt go into another time, I decided I would not let the looming festive season dictate my life and have stopped pushing myself now. (With positive results).
I pulled together a number of the resources I’ve gathered over the years and sat down to work through them. I’ve recognised that I have not been making any actual real art work for a couple months and want to understand why I get long lulls like this. My goal is to do some practical work every day, not just ‘research’ and planning. But I allow myself to get too tied up in knots by my own mind, wrestling with what I’m doing, why etc etc. all the usual doubt filled nonsense. I know that ‘thinking through doing’ is by far the most effective way to move forwards but I just haven’t been able to get on with it.
I thought a session of review and planning might help kick me back into action. Afterall there are boards to gesso and cut, which requires no actual creative thinking and yet they are still sitting in my studio, gathering dust. I had to work out why I put myself in creative stasis like this.
I tried reminding myself of the successes and progress I made this year, to focus my ideas for things I want to achieve in the next. I’ve done some version of this for years and it does help with the practicalities such as where I want to apply to exhibit and how I want to use my website etc. On developing my creative ideas, it too can prove useful but for actually sitting down and doing the work it’s a bit like designing a beautifully colour coded timetable of what needs to be done instead of actually doing the work.
Fundamentally, I still have issues with justifying taking time, energy and resources to make art when I am not properly able to earn my living from it yet. I have that parental voice in my head that asks when the money will come in and there is nothing more stifling than the failure I feel when I think like that.
I have sold work this year, more than before. I have exhibited more than before and I know above all else that I cannot make work just to earn money. Not only does it not want to come out but even if it does it does not sell. It’s like people can feel the difference, even if technically it’s good and well considered. If the heart’s not in it, it does not resonate with people. (I know that’s not just me being fanciful and have direct experience of this, have discussed it with my artist friends and listened to a lot of podcasts, where it comes up time and again).
Not that I believe the adage ‘that if you make the work the money will follow’. It takes a lot of hard work to put mechanisms in place that will enable the earning from a creative practice. Yet that effort is focussed on how to get the art out there so the people it resonates with can get hold of it, not in the making of it to start with.
So, if I cannot (and should not) justify my creative practice in simply in monetary terms how can I? Indeed, why do I feel I have to justify it in the first place and why do I let these thoughts stop me from producing my work like this?
These are actually quite hard and painful questions, being wrapped up in areas of self-esteem and confidence. Plus, it’s often not that easy to get to the bottom of what is derailing us and why we feel certain ways. In fact, I’ve considered the ‘why do I make’ question for years but never been able to really pin anything specific down. That is until two resources I have recently found converged, right at a time when I needed to get to the bottom of this.
The How to show yourself and your work to the world course on Domestika by Lauren Currie helped me realise how much I needed to address my attitude about what value I place on what I have to offer and particularly my responsibility (as a middle class woman of a certain age) to be visible.
Secondly I also discovered a simple but effective technique called 5xwhy shared by artist Helen Wells in her blog post The power of asking ‘why?’ and why we make art. I am a big fan of Helen’s sharing and strongly recommend you subscribe to her videos and try some of her classes.
For this exercise I started with Why do I make art? and fought my way through what felt like dead-end answers, swerving past the hurdles of seemingly final statements and kept asking the whys around the outside of them until I felt I had dug down pretty deep. Yes, it took plenty more than 5 why’s the exercise title alluded to but it was worth it. I landed on three key points I feel good about.
- Art is how I feed my curiosity (the key to a long and healthy life in my opinion)
- Art is how I make myself visible (never my strong point and increasingly important as I age)
- Art is how I connect with others (through making, sharing, learning about and consuming)
So here I am, being visible and writing about why I make art and why it matters to me, why I will continue to do so.
Perhaps this might resonate with someone else too.