What “Making Art” Is NOT.

I expect most readers will disagree with my views, but I am compelled to put them down anyway.

Whenever I write or talk about creativity and the creative process, or whenever someone finds out I make art, I get these sorts of comments:

“You are sooooo talented.  I can’t even draw a straight line.”  [I can’t either.  I use a ruler or T-square for a guide and often the line is still NOT straight.]

“Art is a gift.  You got it and I didn’t.”

In a recent article about why people keep making art when they get little to no feedback, a fellow artist wrote saying”

“It is in your genes.  Artists can’t NOT make art.”

You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.  Maria Callas  See: 

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/mariacalla163370.html#Lm8yr217KWFHPSIj.99

I did this right after my heart stent.  I’m giving it to the heart rehab facility.

When people tell me they have always wanted to create art, but they just were not given that gift, you may notice a little grimace pass across my facial features.  That is just me restraining myself from slapping you about the head and shoulders.

I think people that claim they want to “make art” but don’t, are using the “it is in your genes” myth to excuse their laziness. It is like me hearing my son talking about some scientific question and wishing I had a PhD and unlimited funds to investigate that question.  It is never going to happen, and I really don’t want to do the work it would take to have a PhD in molecular biology or theoretical physics.


Ability is linked to effort.

I sometimes say, and firmly believe this:  “If you had done as many drawings and paintings as I have done, you would be a better artist than I am.

I do not accept that artistic talent is in your genes, or that it is a gift from God.  Of course there are some names that beg to differ.  Mozart and Shakespeare appear to have had extraordinary “makers of art” and their amazing work seems to have been effortlessly produced.  I don’t understand the easy and volume of art made by Mozart and Shakespeare, and I doubt if there could ever be another Mozart or Shakespeare.

I agree to set aside some artists as being so astounding that we just have to leave them in the category of Mystery.  This does not explain my work, or the millions of other talented makers of art in the disciplines of painting, music, dance, software design, et cetera.

Eric Hoffer wrote, [paraphrase] When it comes to talent, we are still in the food gathering stage.  We don’t know how to grow it.

Hoffer thought that becoming good at something depended on numerous factors.  In America adults might see a kid throw a stone and suggest they try baseball.  American’s admire and encourage sports and we produce a lot of gifted athletes.  In Florence around 1515, if a kid was doing a drawing with chalk drawing on the sidewalk, the adults would admire that, get that kid someone to work with, and they encouraged art rather than baseball. 


If the culture admires something, it will produce citizens who are good at what is admired.

Yes, sometimes a talent comes out that does not appear to be encouraged, and it is something not admired by the home, and still it emerges.  That is not proof that the skill is a gift or a quirk of the genes.  All that means is that we don’t have all the information we need to know why this person became this, or that.

In my own case, my father thought of himself as an artist.  He only painted about twenty or thirty finished works, but all of them are better than my best work.  My father is far more skilled as an artist than I am.  In the early 1950s my father had his shirts cleaned at a Dry Cleaner’s shop, and when the shirts came back, they had a little cardboard inside to keep the shirt wrinkle free.  My father gave me the shirt cardboards and  stuff to draw and paint with, and I was encouraged to draw.  This was before I had a TV or siblings.  I spent a lot of time alone, and I entertained myself by drawing.

In school I was an unmotivated student, so while class was going on around me I drew on everything around me.  I drew on notebook paper, on homework papers, on handouts. I would imagine I have doodled and drawn many thousands of times.  I believe if you want to draw as good as me you would need to draw as many doodles and pictures as I have drawn.

I don’t know what causes someone to be good at drawing, or playing the guitar, or whatever art you can think of, but I do believe that art improves with practice. 

Here is a big difference between artists and non-artists.  Something keeps a talented person practicing.  I took piano lessons, but I didn’t keep after it, I didn’t practice, and I am not good at playing the piano.  I firmly believe I could be a good piano player, had I practiced, but I didn’t.  The artist and the non-artist differ because of motivation to practice.  That is it.  That is the difference.

So when I struggle with the question of why artists keep making art with little or no positive rewards, I do not believe they keep working because it is in their genes.

I know too many very talented artists who quit.  My father painted 20 paintings and he quit.  I had a friend in high school, now a philosophy professor in West Virginia, who was an extremely talented artist.  He isn’t making art today.  I thought Richard Montgomery was going to be one of the great artists of America.  I firmly believed he would be a full time, successful artist with works in the great museums of the world, but it didn’t happen.  Life caused my friend to bump into other interests.  My friend is a professor, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a mentor to collegiate youth.  My friend is successful, his life is successful and to be admired.  But he was very skilled at making art in 1968 and he quit making that sort of art.

I have stopped making art, but I never quit making art. 

I struggle with self-doubt.  I fear criticism and rejection.  My wife hangs art prints she bought at Hobby Lobby, and does not understand why that bothers me.  Family and friends have accepted paintings from me, and later I have learned they “re-gifted” them.  It is possible some of them were “gag gifted” to colleagues at office parties.  I rarely sell a picture.  I am so afraid of rejection and failure that I don’t go to art shows, or seek to hang my work in local coffee shops.  Still, I continue to paint.  Most people my age have stopped making art and I just wonder why some people with greater abilities stop and other people, like me, with less ability, keep painting.

I firmly believe that making art is a trivial pursuit.  On the grand scale, making art is labor to create something that most people don’t want.  My art is mildly supported by my friends and family.  My wife may not personally love the work I make, but she says she loves me, and on birthdays and Xmas she does give me gift certificates to the art store so I can keep stocked up with canvas and paint.  She doesn’t object to me having one room in our small house where I can paint.  She didn’t fuss when I rented a Temperature Controlled storage facility to store my completed works.   The world does not care about my work.  This country has an income gap so very few people have enough money to buy art.  The majority of the country is lower middle class to poor and those people don’t buy art.  I live in a very poor state, Oklahoma where art is rarely fine. 

One of the few times I did an outdoor art festival I sat all day every day for three days and sold nothing.  In the both next to me the artist was selling something he called turd birds.  He took dried horse feces, and horse “droppings” are about the size of charcoal briquette, but much softer.  He put toothpicks into to the horse turd to make legs, a couple of feathers for wings, and a second smaller turd and toothpick making a head and beak.  The turd birds sold like crazy. My work did not sell at all.

Motivation is an interesting thing.  I wish I had more of it.  If I worked more I would create a greater body of work.  Good art comes only after making lots of bad art.  I want to crank out as much bad work as I can, because I believe that is the only way I will get to the place where more of my work is better. 

My guess is that a few of my works will hang on the walls of a few friends and relatives, and the rest of it will eventually find its way to a landfill.  I hope some of my work survives.  I’m still leaving a trace of myself in this work.  Once I’m dead, I am guessing it won’t matter much to me what happens to the work.  My motivation is weak, but I keep trying.  It isn’t a gift.  It might be a curse.  It is what it is.

January paintings

The painting was crooked when I photographed it so I never got it straight.  It is collage with some acrylic. 24 by 36 inches.

This is a parody painting.  24 by 24 inches

24" by 24" a mixed media mostly collage with a real bandage over where my stent was placed.  Everything is approximate and done by someone who has never actually seen a real human heart. 

This one is a nod to the Frost poem about two roads diverging in a yellow wood.  It is corny, done corny, and it is 2 feet by 4 feet so it is a behind the couch painting.

Why? That's my Question. Why Make Art?

I just finished a book called Art and Fear that discusses the questions of why many talented artists in a variety of fields stop making art.  I have a related but different question:  Why do people who have every reason to give up, keep on making art?

Makers of Art give up when their self doubts grow to the point where they just see no point in perpetuating their creative ruse.  Makers of Art give up when their family and/or their audience rejects their work with vitriolic vigor.  I understand why such makers of creative stuff might stop when something important is mocked to the point that their heart feels like it is torn and bleeding.  What I don’t get are people who create anyway.   

There are artists like Vincent Van Gogh.  

Mr. Van Gogh desired fame and fortune, and he had rejection from his family, and the buying public, nevertheless, he continued to make art.  I’ve read that he made around nine hundred works of art but only sold one during his lifetime.  What sustained Van Gogh to keep working with so little positive feedback?

But I’m not just wondering about people who stand up against the world’s rejection, I’m thinking about people who reject recognition.  There are two artists that come to mind immediately.  The first is David Pearson, a British artist. 

 He taught art, retired, and then kept to himself.  When people stopped by to talk he always seemed in a hurry to get back to something.  After his death more than 20,000 pieces of art, from huge canvasses to tiny sculptures, were found at his home. 

The whole time he was making art, he was NOT trying to sell his art, or show his art, he was drive to do one thing only, and that was making his art.  One student said that they students where Mr. Pearson was teaching art had no idea he was creating a large body of art.  He helped them but he didn't share his interests. 

The second artist I think of is Bernard Gilardi, a Wisconsin artist. 

The one thing that was clear to everyone who knew him, was that Mr. Gilardi did not care about scoring big.  Apparently the thing Mr. Gilardi cared about was painting. He cared about creating surreal and wonderfully comedic worlds of his own making, which he did in solitude for more than 40 years. He spent many evenings and weekends in the basement of his small, near north side Milwaukee home where the walls were painted peach and the space was his own.  He had a job, and a family, and he did what life called on him to do, but as frequently as his life allowed, he went to his basement studio and painted.  During his life Mr. Gilardi managed to make nearly 400 paintings. 

One story I read said that it was after his funeral, when family and friends were in the home, that someone mentioned that Mr. Gilardi painted and that there were pictures down in the basement.  That sounds like there were few if any examples of his work hanging on the walls of his home.

Or consider a folk artist from India named, Nek Chand. 

Chand was born in 1924 in a small village in Punjab, India. He worked as a farmer in his community until the 1947 partition of Pakistan and India, when Chand's Hindu family was forced to leave their belongings and relocate. After the move, Chand separated from his family and in 1954, he married and became a road inspector. Chand's duties put him in close proximity to the ruins and rubble of a quickly changing India. In 1958 Chand began collecting stones, he found on the job as a road inspector.  Chand started bringing these stones home one by one because his mod of transportation was a bicycle.  Chand selected a  hidden locale he transformed into a magical space; his own private kingdom. For seven years Chand used rocks to build a secret world, along with materials gathered from abandoned hospitals and businesses. He formed statue after statue of his partially humanoid forms and their beautifully lopsided features. The 18-acre-site, which is now public, is a spiritual garden of recycled materials and childhood dreams. There are now 3,000 sculptures dispersed throughout the rock garden, not including the many rocks which, when admired carefully, contort to resemble the human face. 

And consider Emily Dickinson.

   

Ms Dickinson was a poet who wrote throughout her life, but never achieved even local recognition of her work.  Over the years she carefully copied her poems on pages that she then sewed together with string or ribbon forming little books referred to today as fascicles.  What kept her writing when she had few if any readers? 

This is one of my burning questions:  Why?  Did these creative people not want an audience?  Of course they did.  Not only did they want an audience, they each expected to have an audience.  Emily Dickinson carefully arranged her poems into booklets and left them to be discovered in her desk.  I have read that she asked her sister to burn her papers, but when you find a stack of handmade books you know they don’t want those books destroyed.

If an artist paints a picture and the one and only value they have is the act of painting, and if they have absolutely NO interest in having their finished work admired by others, then they would destroy the work as soon as it was done.  You don’t stack up 2000 paintings in your tiny house and not expect someone to find them after you die.

In my own case I seem to have an aversion to self promotion.  I go to a coffee house sometimes that has local artists hang their work and offer it for see and the fee for this is zero.  I have been asked several times to allowing my work to show there.  I am not against people seeing my work.  I am not against selling my work.  But for some reason I can’t make myself show my work there.  Perhaps I’m just too lazy to do the work of framing, and transporting, and hanging my work.  Perhaps I am so afraid of rejection and criticism that I want to be dead before anyone sees it, so that if viewers confirm my self-doubt that it will hurt less due to my being dead.

Something motivates us to make art.  In ancient times, when there was no way to make money from art, artists still made arrowheads fancier than arrowheads needed to be, and although it was dark and a long ways in the dark, and the work had to be done by the light of a torch, cave paintings were created and no one got paid, no one got famous, and I wonder why did those people make art?