Sunny Now, But Dark Clouds Shadow the Horizon
I have moments every day where I stop and think “Maybe I’m happier being a pencil pusher than an artist” but then I remind myself that I’m pencil pushing because I want to have the means to make my art. Instead of investing in a vacation house in Maui, or investing in a family, or trying to get a larger McMansion and sexier automobile, I’m funneling my efforts into something less conventional. And whether my work talks about gender or Jesus, whether I’m using digital photography, oil-based paints, whether I’m writing goofy little movie shorts to animate online or long epic fairy tales, whether I print little 5X7 porno cards in a shack in Alaska or travel the world making documentaries about the secret to a happy life, I will be consciously infusing my work with values and dreams that I feel are important to share with other people. Sometimes I’ll be behind a desk to earn the finanacial means to make these other things happen. Maybe someday I won’t need the pencil pushing job. Maybe I’ll be chained to a desk until the day I die. But it’s the sacrifice I’m willing to make in order to do what I want to do.
Would I be happier if I could be a mindless worker without any creative ambitions? Hell yeah. Is ignorant bliss what I want? Hell no.
I can feel depression approaching. Gotta fight it.
January 9th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Jason,
The worse thing about depression is that one doesn’t want to talk to the people whom one loves most. I always felt as though I didn’t want to contaminate them with my own “down” feelings.
Yesterday I saw a DVD about Joe Downing, the artist who recently died at 82 in France and who was from Horse Cave, Kentucky, a very small little town. In it he said that no one can teach you to do art, they can only teach you to love art.
As I was reading your blog and thinking of Downing’s statement, I remembered a quote from Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery:
If you want to build a ship
don’t herd people together to collect wood
and don’t assign them tasks and work,
but rather teach them to long for the
endless immensity of the sea.
That is what you are saying, I think — you are longing for the immensity of what your love for art is calling you to. Downing also said that the only advice to give an artist was to be true to his own vision and avoid fads and fashions and trends. I am putting his thought into my own words here.
Some of us intend to keep loving you forever even if your vision includes resisting our good intentions.
Robert