Replies: 12 Comments
on Wednesday, October 5th, walt said
As I recall both Pollack and de Kooning had wives who had a plan.
Hyacinthe, when you began the artworld was quite a different place. A professor of mine (Rober D'Arista) once told me that when he needed money he'd go down to Washington Sq. with a couple of woodcut prints, sell one or two for $5 each and have enough to pay rent, buy some food and maybe make it down to the Cedar Bar for a beer with Franz Kline and de Kooning.
"Hi honey. Look at this great print I bought in the park for $1,000! What a steal!" Now tell me who is walking around the park these days with $300-$1,000 in their pockets let alone buying art? Depending on where you live in this country that's what it costs for a space to live and work in even if you're sharing it with other like minded souls. And think about how many of those $5 prints you'd have to sell to make rent. Yes, if you are really adventurous and frugal and willing to share your mattress with the roaches and the rats you might be able to shave a couple hundred off those prices. I know I have done that over the years and I know artists right now doing it. But I'm way past sleeping with the roaches these days and I bet you haven't slept with any for a long time yourself.
I've watched it change in my 30 some odd years of making art. I'm 52. Just got the official notification that I've been teaching 20 years from the college. I've seen the artworld change in that period of time. There are so many more people who want, or think they want, to be artists today. Most of them fail. And still so few who collect art in any pure way. Of course as you said there are other things an artist can do besides make paintings or sculptures as a means to make some living/spending money. And I have done as much of that as fit my work, my goals and my personality.
Another of my painting professors used to tell me the same thing you have said about simply following ones bliss. I believed him. Then I taught beside him for 10 years. Low and behold once I saw past the facade we all extend to the public I found he had an iron clad plan. And he followed it like a cadet follows orders. And it worked. He retired at 55 and now paints full time and is still young enough to enjoy himself.
Yes it is important to follow ones bliss. It is important to take the journey, get on the path etc., etc.. But I believe that humans are of more than one modality. I am both right and left brained. I can be quite linear at the same time will veer to a lateral tack when the wind changes (whether it is a creative or pragmatic wind)and explore something new or find a shorter path. My plans are flexible and collapsible and sometimes they are put on the back burner till the time is ripe. And from the looks of things on your resume you've also made plans if only for various projects. Is not ones life a project as well?
Thanks Gabriella. And while I agree with Mike about not making art just to make money, yet why shouldn't one learn to make money from the art one makes? And to do that doesn't one need some idea of where to find those who will buy it? And how does one meet these folks if they don't just show up at your door, your next exhibition or your website? And isn't the very fact that one thinks about these issues the beginning of a plan whether conscious or not? And wouldn't an uncounscious plan look a bit like a path? Paths are made by a number of feet (or the same two feet) passing between the same two points in the forest again and again. Only one lost in the wilderness has no plan. Which is why they got lost in the first place. Look there's nothing wrong with taking a walk in the woods from time to time. Even long hikes. But no one goes on a week long hike without organizing a few provisions, a knife and a compass--that is unless they know the terraine like the back of their hand...but then they really aren't lost in the woods are they?
on Tuesday, October 4th, Hyacinthe Baron said
When I was a young girl, around 9, we were staying in a hotel in the New York mountains. I took a walk and there in the middle of a forest clearing, growing among a bed of dried pine needles was a beavertail cactus.
I knew then that anything is possible and that nothing is ever what it seems. It was at that age that my teacher in Public School asked my mother if she could adopt me, to nurture and further and guide the talent.
It was a world of negatives around me and so not until my twenties did I start to make art. The first work was complete, accomplished as if in another life I had made this art. The first piece sold and every piece thereafter.
I had to learn to take care of my children and family and find hours in the night to create.
I planned my paintings and portraits in my head so that when I got to the canvas it was merely a point of execution...and that left the freedom to be open to accident, to the lose of self and ego that occurs when one is involved in artmaking, that high that no drug can equal.
I argued this with Timothy Leary one day at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. He said none of it mattered. We were all mutating anyway so we could be fit to live on other planets.
Jose I am sorry that something more you wanted has somehow eluded you. And glad that you do recognize how much art has given you.
The positive is to follow the thread of imagination, to explore the forest, to allow yourself to be lost because the way out will always be the truest path.
on Tuesday, October 4th, Andrew said
Gabriella, following the path one has chosen is not an option for any of us. When you think of life's experiences, and gaze at the path you think is your own future, do you see it as the tracks ahead of your locomotive? Turn around, and look behind you; the only thing you really have is your trainload of experience. This is what creates the path you think you're choosing, your wisdom if you will. You can change your future, but you have to change your past first, those events that you can return to in the attic of your life, and which have to be put in order before you can hope to make any free choices at all. Settle those debts, organize your past, and only then can you direct the course, or path, of your future. Find yourself making the same mistakes over and over? Repeating things is symptomatic of your so called choices not being in your hands, but being conditioned by past events in your own life. Not, as many would like to believe, by external events you can't control.
I myself am just lost in the forest. That's the path I'm on, but around every corner, something surprises me, elates me, and challenges me. I keep adding to my bag of tricks. My 'plan' is to just keep on going for as long as I can, since when all is said and done, this forest is still very big, after all.
on Tuesday, October 4th, gabriella said
Jose;
The terms "strategy","formula" and "plan", recur in many responses to your blog. What does not emerge is the term "path" and and what that may mean in terms of one's progress as a productive artist over a lifetime of working, except maybe in Walt's response.."I'm doing the work I feel called to do rather than work like what I see is selling".
Let us assume that each of us comes to a juncture in the road of life, and many paths of opportunity diverge from the main road. Which one to take? After a few testings of several of the paths to gauge the possibilities of terrain, one makes a committment, for good or ill, to following along the path chosen for the journey.
All kinds of impediments, personal and otherwise, may arise along the way. One may meet kindred wayfarers who may have retraced the path back to report of difficulties that lie ahead or to tell of a pleasant oasis that can be reached shortly. This is how I view reading the comments and reports from many of you on this site.
I find encouragement from these readings to proceed on my own chosen path and to take a long view of the process of making art. For myself, I know i have to make manageable goals, and for this reason a five-year plan seems awfully rigid.
A five year plan could be easily abandoned when faced with a decision as to how best proceed, and also, i think one should build some flexibility into decision making. i think that allowance can be made for the evolution of ideas and the self, and doing this can make the whole of the journey retain its freshness.
on Tuesday, October 4th, jose said
Thank you all so far for your comments and sharing your insights. I feel most of you got the zest of what I'm rambling on about here but I wish to add a few things because I feel there may have been some misunderstanding as to what I was trying to bring across.
I somehow get the feeling from your response, Hyacinthe, that you take me for one of those who lament their fate and have expressed feelings of failure. Having reread my blog I fail to see where this happens. But allow me first to respond to your comments on my need for a plan. If read attentively my text clearly reveals that this was not a fixed plan – I styled it after the soviet model, yes, but I relegated it to the back of my mind no sooner had I visualized it and interiorized it – made it my own, allowing the formula to live within me, as you put it. I state in no uncertain terms that the focus of my activity from that moment on was my Art, not my plan.
I do not wish to sound condescending but allow me to bring a few things into perspective. Art is indeed a gift and something that flows unimpeded and can therefore not be structured or contained, but not all of us are born into conditions that allow that flux to circulate and grow at the outset. Some of us may have grown under oppressive political and social systems that did not favour or even neglected the cultural dimension and therefore sought to thwart by subtle [and sometimes not so subtle] means the aspirations of its more outgoing elements. Systems that shaped our minds into believing that music / painting / sculpture / dance / literature were merely there to be enjoyed as rewards by those who had achieved something of merit [It was not something ‘real people’ did. ‘Real people’ had jobs and contributed to society and the economy in meaningful ways]. Systems in which unless you had the good fortune to have landed in a ‘subversive’ environment you would have been so well protected from such subversive influences that you would have tended to conform to what was expected of you because you would have had no means of knowing that the subversive was open to you.
In my youth, I sadly confess, I conformed to the norm. I loved painting and music but I did not have sufficient courage to fight the system and so I set out to shape my world accordingly: I generated a matrix within me that saw me as a senior diplomat at 40. My encounters with the subversive element came too late [or so I allowed myself to believe for the better part of 10 years], the matrix was well in place and I was too deep into University to dream of switching tracks.
But the damage had been done. The more peeks I took beyond the looking-glass a definite shift occurred and I became increasingly aware that Art was what was REAL – I could see how it sought, through the medium of different agents, to explore our relative position within the web of confusion we found ourselves in, to expose the comedy / ridiculousness / tragedy / wonder of it all and disclose the paths WE had taken at different times throughout evolution. I thought that if we learnt to look beyond the formal limitations each artist encountered in his time and which characterized their style we would clearly distinguish these paths extending from the first etchings, through to the works of our contemporaries, onward towards the shapes and colours of its Becoming which, for us, lies for ever in the future. I theorized that this was why Art appealed to those who operate in the ‘real world’ – the busy, serious world that provides the framework. Because they sense that in some mysterious way the colours, shapes and rhythms that the artist composes transport them to a part of themselves they have fewer and fewer opportunities to connect with; this was the raw material the artist took to market and I wanted to have a go at it [a very personal view, I agree, but there you have it for what it’s worth].
I wanted more than anything to stay on this new side of the looking-glass… BUT I did not have such a matrix within me, hence the plans as explained in the blog. A certain discipline was necessary to generate a new matrix for Being. The plans were visualized and interiorized very much like one visualizes and interiorizes the qualities of the various Tibetan deities one aspires to make one’s own. Unfortunately in that area many practitioners equally become stiff and limited by the very techniques that could liberate them. I was extremely fortunate, as I refer in the opening bit of my text, in that I met a few people (of which I only mention artists because this is an Art related site) who hit me on the head when my ego got carried away and who taught me how to use this model of Becoming without falling prey to the ‘structure’.
The plan never interferes with the painting… the paintings slowly reveal the plan. It has been working for me, it has carried me farther than I ever could have dreamt when I left Law School and my other life. It may sound contrived to many people out there, fortunate enough to have had other life-experiences, but I hope that sharing these ideas can be of help to others in similar conditions as mine.
on Tuesday, October 4th, paul said
Somewhere in Jose's post there is something about being aware of the shortcomings of the artistic lifestyle,but its my veiw that if one knew what was to be,one wouldve ran off screaming in terror,there is something of the type of hardships contained in Walts post,and worse,I sometimes think that to go through the mental, emotional, and financial gymnastics and contortions one is often obliged to go through all for the sake of doing art,goes against reason,a freind said something I have also often thought about over the years,and thats autism,meaning one is a bit autistic to some degree to be an artist,certainley the sheer amount of time,often at ones personal cost,via freinds or a social life certainley money,that someone is spending on a subject with no apparent benefits,other than the doing of it,can defy beleif,although its certainley not all like this as Hyacinthe has pointed out.You know everything is personal,and largeley I started out with the idea that an artist paints in his studio,so thats what I did,and it was about a person in a room on their own facing a canvas,and like this for years,now the journey that one takes in this way is quite unique,its like the wild west of self,where you are totally alone thrown upon your own rescources,it is a question of survival,and its oneself that has carved out this way of going on,because you are dealing with existential concerns and grappling with the nature of freedom,all this came about because I wanted to paint,simple,but theres a whole different world in the studio.Selling,we all need and want to sell,get those babies out there,but say no one wants them,what then? Its easy if they do want them,then you never have to think about the what ifs,then its easy,trouble is you dont really know why your stuff is selling or not selling,oh of course after its been selling one can say,talented,gifted,as maybey Hyacinthe is as she has intimated,and there certainley are people doing very well from their art,no doubt,and jolly good luck to them too,but for the rest of us grinders,we just carry on against the odds.
on Tuesday, October 4th, Michael Fornadley said
Could we all come to the belief that some artwork is made not to be sold but springs from a individual expression, seriously do most of us consider before we start making a piece whether it will sell or not, hope not. Granted we do live in a world where in making it you have to have a material or historical track record, we would be fools to think that we do not get a thrill out of success. Really a fine balance to be true to yourself and establishing a market for your work, when do we make the decision to tone down a work to make it more acceptable to the buying public, question is does this stop us from growing in our craft by appeasing the forces that provide that feeling of success. The term "professional artist" always made me secretly chuckle anyway, face it we will basically be student artists till the date of our deaths, history should of taught us that by now. We will never be satisfied with our work or our goals, always a greener pasture somewhere over the hill, the secret is to enjoy doing art to the point of it not destroying more important elements in life like as said before raising families and long lasting relationships with friends and loved ones.
on Monday, October 3rd, Hyacinthe Baron said
More thoughts that occur when I hear artists lament their fate and express feelings of failure...the formula lies within the art creations themselves, not in any outward plan the artist wishes to impose on the art.
I honed my art skills by creating, by painting and when I worked all good things fell into place, museums, shows, galleries, collectors.
I tried my formula for technique on handpainted couture and sold to celebrity fashionistas, I handpainted on shower curtains and pillows, and even placemats.We had over 400 artists copying my designs and the windows of major department stores and articles in the New York and London Times and on and on. The merchandise applied with my art designs sold out everywhere and at the same time created a demand for my originals in the stores and cataloges all over the world.
Someone once asked me when I quit my job as a publicist for E.J. Korvette in New York to paint full time: "How did you think you would make a living?" I never thought about that part of it at all. I didn't have to. My art provided the answers.
on Monday, October 3rd, John Powell said
Jose,keep writing those provocative thoughts cus i am one who follow your writing.
NB.I am proposing to people who are professionals,to contact:JOHN POWELL who is a "Consulting Editor" for "The American Biographical Institute".For possible inclusion in "THE CONTEMPORARY WHOS WHO OF PROFESSIONAL",which will be released this year.
Await your CONTACT
Thanks,
on Monday, October 3rd, Hyacinthe Baron said
This is an interesting discussion to me because I come from a unique position having suceeded as an arist who not only supported several families through art sales but who always made the decision to create what inspired me and to make only those choices that I felt comfortable with.
I do not boast. Rather I am filled with wonder as I discover how difficult it seems to be for some artists to reach their goals.
Perhaps the problem lies in having artistic goals at all. Art inspiration and the obsessive compulsive nature that spawns the need to make art are difficult enough to acquire without putting false demands on the need to create.
We give birth and have children and nurture them and hope we too will be nurtured in so doing. We can assemble the necessary elements to make art, a decent studio, time, ambition.
But we must be true to ourselves once the decision is made to be an artist. Making art is like making love...passion makes it fulfilling. Would you make a plan for the episode of making love. First I'll lay the rose petals on the bed and then I will watch the reaction of my beloved...and so on?
I didn't finish school, I had no studies only mentors and in the long run it was my innate talent that propelled the art I made and impressed the collectors who felt my work was for them. So the bottom line is and can only be...VALIDITY.
Four year plans are fine for business...but not when they interrupt the process of making art...
It's the old adage again...it works...every time...without exception...give...give...freely, artistically, without expectation of reward...and the universe will reward you, the artist, with more than you ever could have hoped for.
Try it, you'll like it. Just make it, and give it out...art will take on a life of its own.
on Monday, October 3rd, Andrew said
Jose, the series of four five-year plans seems so very structured coming from an artist. But that's my and a lot of other people's indoctrination as to what an artist is supposed to be apart from their art. We see Jackson Pollack becoming legendary with no apparent trace of a plan, drunkenly accomplishing what most of us only dream of. Then, we remember, that's Hollywood. The image of an artist vs their actual persona. And how we are attracted to image! It makes credible what otherwise is difficult to believe, and yet, has absolutely nothing to do with the work that a person produces. Image is in itself a production. I know teachers that are great artists, and I know 'artists' that wear the right clothes, know the right people, and try to make everyone believe they're collected by the right collectors, sought after by the right gallerys, etc. Losers. I can tell from OC's previous comments that to him, IMAGE is where it's at, not the art. If you don't dress in black, shoot heroin, have severe mental disorders, and spit upon the people who try to help you out, then you can't be an artist. VISIBLE often means descending to this level, because it's what the status quo expects.
When you have a plan, it might not go the way you thought it would, and hopefully, you enlarge yourself and your work uniquely because of the sudden change in direction. I wouldn't want to know for sure what's going to happen next, because then there wouldn't be any point in doing it, would there?
Your last line, Jose, is perfect. If the work's no good, you'll know it better than anyone else, and take that mediocrity with you to your grave, no matter whose clothes you're wearing, no matter how much frosting is on that Twinkie.
on Monday, October 3rd, walt said
Jose, the term visible is perfect. It really is the place were it all begins. You cannot have the larger dialogue with your times if they cannot see you. Stardom on the other hand suggests you are beyond the dialogue. That what you have to say and how you say it is no longer challenged, nor challenging. It is accepted by the status quo and now it is not the art but the star they are seeing.
I had a similar plan some time back. Although mine goes further back in time and began with just getting through college. Once I was convinced that college would be a good thing not a waste of my time and drain on my talents I decided I needed to pay for my education and my family through my artistic skills in some form. After a little looking around I chose to study Illustration because it looked like a viable way to gain employment and also gave me more than enough encouragement and focus to study painting at the same time. It worked, I was working from the end of my 2nd year on as a designer and illustrator. I paid for two degrees and a little extra-- two lovely little boys who are now men. It was hard but it was good.
Meanwhile my painting began to develope slowly into something very personal. I too believed, and still do, that allowing the work to find it's own voice would open doors.
Around my 3rd year I met a professor who both challenged and inspired me with his knowledge and his stance on being an artist. I watched the way he taught and motivated his students. I'd been doing some outside teaching already and began to realize I was being 'called' so to speak to that profession. Again, pragmatics had something to do with it. I saw I could make a living, leave behind the more commercial aspect of what I'd studied and focus more on the painting. At least I thought that's how it would work. So I got my graduate degree and also earned some national and international level kudos in the commercial world.
But the teaching profession was suffering as I finished and there were hundreds and even thousands applying for nearly every position. I really struggled to find a full-time job. I needed benefits for the family. One of them being free college tuition for my boys. By this time I was 32+ years old, with no savings, no property, not even a car, two kids and a courageous wife who would follow me anywhere.
I was finally hired back at my alma mater. Not my first choice. I'd have prefered a university with more options. But I took the job and got started building a life which included a regular studio/painting/exhibition discipline. I began showing my work in alternative and not-for-profit galleries and even got a little local notice in the papers. But I was still operating on the first plan. So it was time for a new strategy.
I thought in soviet style 5 year plans also. I figured in 5 years I'd move on to a university position. It didn't happen. After 7 years of teaching I had some political problems at the college that caused me to rethink my goals.
It dawned on me that the life span of visibility locally was short. And showing in the alternative spaces was not getting me into commercial galleries where I could actuallly sell work. So I saw myself spiralling out from my home town into the region and sought any oppurtunity to pursue exhibitions in regional college and university galleries. The plan worked beautifully. Within a year or two I'd shown in a number of spaces all around the state and into the neighboring states. Still no offers to show my work in commercial galleries.
I showed once in Chicago. Then I had an oppurtunity to exhibit in Budapest. It was not the first time my work had been seen there. But this would be a serious exhibition. 10 years went by after that and eveything seemed to sit on hold. I was back to showing locally and regionally. I had a show in Oklahoma. Was written up as a curator for a show in an art mag from Chicago. But the plan seemed to just hover. Then I began to find other international oppurtunities. Germany, Croatia, Argentina. Still no commercial galleries were knocking.
Began to realize that not having a sales record was the problem. All those alternative galleries did not help beyond a certain point. I began to wonder if the art I was making was really any good at all. A few times I was ready to scrap it all. After all I had a cushy teaching job which by that time had gotten me past the political problems. I even had seniority in my department.
Then I began showing on the internet. Not my idea. I had no faith in it. A friend invited me and my youngest son who studied media at the college (free tuition) convinced me it was worth a try. I began to sell a little on the east and west coast. And began to get invitations to show in commercial galleries on those coasts. I began to see that what I do has a market in either place but not in the middle of the country. So, after more than 30 years of study, searching my soul and for markets I'm finally beginning to have a little success. Not much mind you. I'm still working on the last phase of my strategy...living completely off my art rather than off my artistic skills and knowledge. To many they seem the same but the reality is quite different. And it all depends on which way one does it. Had I worked first on living from my painting rather than my illustration skills I might still have taught but it would have been from a painters perspective rather than illustration. ( I do have great love and respect for good illustration and the artists who do it because it is their calling, but I only chose it as a strategy not out of that love...I needed to be a painter.) I did a lot of tacking around the lake. Probably went miles when I could have found a way to do it in yards. But at each turn I couldn't see past my responsabilities.
So here I am finally working towards that sales record. I'm having a little success these days as I said. I'm doing the work I feel called to do rather than work like what I see is selling.
That is my greatest satisfaction...after seeing my kids mature into their own lives.
A quick word before the actual blog. What struck me and interested me most about artists before I decided to become one was not that they ran the risk of becoming famous but their stance in life - the way they LIVED, the things they thought, how they said them in public and how they managed to condense all this in their work. I owe more than I can say in the short space of a blog to the mentors I have met so far and who revealed bits of the mystery to me and always hit me on the head whenever the ego got carried away. My thanks to Ed Nowak, Lima de Freitas, Nuno Siqueira and Jorge Marcel – for most of you they will be nobodies, for me they became extremely VISIBLE. They affected my perception, they taught me what being an artist was about - whether they were right or wrong is irrelevant, what really matters is that they’ve lent me the tools to stay afloat.
