Some writing following early hours insomniac reading of Blackbird Rook’s post, “Qualified for Nothing”.
I highly recommend reading this Substack post https://open.substack.com/pub/blackbirdrook/p/qualified-for-nothing?r=9enup&utm_medium=ios and its follow up piece https://substack.com/@blackbirdrook/note/c-285378786?r=9enup&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action They are about times (in mid-life usually) when fine artists have to consider other or parallel career options in order to sustain their art practice.
Somehow over the last hour or two, I appear to have written my own stream-of-consciousness follow on piece to it, after a few hours of insomnia which periodically arrests my sleep. Please forgive me if it feels trite and obvious in places, I am sleep-deprived and in need of caffeine!
In relation to the initial piece, in my case, I ‘stopped producing art for 22years in the late 1990s, returning years later during the first lockdown of the pandemic. At the time, I had little inkling that I was deeply missing both the act of painting and the discourse relating to it. Blackbird Rook’s article states that artists often ‘carried the work internally, painfully, while doing what is necessary’ in terms of employment, but in hindsight I realise that in not making painting, I was at a subconscious level missing it deeply, and had used more than one form of dysfunctional coping mechanism over the years to mask this.
Today, after six and a half years of returning to my painting practice, I can’t imagine life without it. At the same time, I feel like I am constantly playing catch up for the 22 years (and several months) when I didn’t paint. This feels very exciting but stressful alongside a demanding job. The job, when it’s fulfilled the way it should be, is both important to vulnerable individuals in my community and creative in itself.
In my idealistic mind, all paid jobs should be creative. And although this is going to please my lefty friends, and hack off my tiny handful of Tory friends, I’m now going to paraphrase Marx (probably very simplistically and badly).
Marx argued that humans are inherently creative and productive beings. Unlike animals, who only produce out of immediate physical need (think spider spinning a web or bees producing perfect hexagonal honeycombs), humans produce even when we are free from physical need; we do this in ways that are beautiful, creative and meaningful to others. Marx set out our need for creative work and creative life in the following manner:
1. Species-Being (Gattungswesen). The term "species-being" is used to describe human nature. Marx believed that our defining characteristic as a species is our ability to consciously and creatively transform the world around us. When we imagine something in our minds, mix our labour with raw materials, and create an object in the physical world, we "objectify" ourselves. We look at the finished product and see our own creativity, intelligence, and personality reflected back at us. ‘Work’ is our method for realising our full potential.
2. The Problem of Alienation (Entfremdung). Because Marx viewed creative work as essential to human happiness, he argued that modern industrial capitalism severely damaged the human psyche. When people work in a repetitive, uncreative factory or do mindlessly dull jobs just to survive, they experience what he refers to as “alienation”.
3. The Ideal: Work as True Self-Expression. Marx’s ultimate vision for a future communist society wasn't a world where no one works, but rather a world where work becomes a form of play and self-expression. He envisioned a society where the survival instinct is taken care of, allowing people the freedom to develop their diverse talents. In one of his most famous (and poetic) passages of writing in ‘The German Ideology’, he described a society where individuals are not locked within a single, mind-numbing, cog-in-the-wheel career path:
"...society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."
In essence, Marx believed that for life to be fulfilling, work and art should meld together, allowing humans to constantly innovate, create, and see their true selves in the world they build.
In our current times (how do I label this? Late Modernity, Liquid Modernity, Post-Industrial Society, the Anthropocene?…) people frequently have to deal with zero hours contracts, the gig economy and ever-increasing retirement age. It feels like governments give more thought to pandering to tax evaders, tax avoiders, shirkers*, (*however you want to describe wealthy incomers to our communities, who pay little and contribute less) than to ensuring that the vulnerable are safeguarded, food poverty is alleviated, marginalised groups are enfranchised; and that medical/ mental health/educational infrastructure is more than a distant-remembered dream of my parents’ baby boomer generation.
I know that other creative friends struggle materially and financially while maintaining a visual art /music/ writing practice or relying on their partners’ incomes. This sometimes makes them feel guilty (and also simultaneously grateful and resentful) and I can see that is often a block in relation to their art practice.
I suppose my half-baked but important message here is that there are inventive ways of being and acting that can sustain you as a painter (or other form of artist/ creative). And these can and do feed into a creative life more generally. To me, it feels so important to undertake other forms of creative participation both individually and collectively. Here are a few suggestions.
1. Build your network (people you talk creatively with - whether this be about art, world events, or even hyper-local ranty news stories - e.g. Guernsey’s looming “trash mountain” and the Great Roadside Weed Inquisition v. Roundup. Make sure your network are people that you trust, like and who have similar values. Introduce them to each other if they aren’t already friends. Meet regularly in person or online in small or larger groups.
2. Talk to people whose values are very different to your own. It’s so easy to live in an echo chamber, but as my friend George pointed out recently, the only way to change the world politically for the better is to engage respectfully with people whose lives and thinking are different from your own; those who see the world differently and who have maybe been contaminated by the toxicity of Farage, Trump, the Tate Brothers etc. Views can and do change with engaged and pro-social challenge.
3. Visit exhibitions, go to music gigs, poetry readings and theatre when you can. The incredible ones fire you up to get back in the studio and work hard, and the mediocre or terrible ones make you feel that you can do as well or far better. Having a rant afterwards about a terrible exhibition or dull and lazy curation by an art wanker (no names mentioned here), to someone in 1. makes me feel SO much better (and yes, I know this is both shallow and unkind, but toxic and self-serving people kind of deserve it. (I shall probably feel ashamed of the previous sentence by this evening and remove it ;-)).
4. Make lists (tasks, events, future projects and ideas), tick them off when completed or re-examined and review them a few months later. This reminds you of what you have achieved as it’s easy to overlook hard work and progress within the frequent maelstrom of living.
5. Set out short-term goals. These may change quickly over the next month or even week, but they provide a sense of momentum and progress.
6. Write to or comment on posts of artists or creative people you admire. This is not sycophantic or uncool (who cares about cool anyhow) most people feel uplifted by a thoughtful interpretation of their work or a sentence that makes them feel genuinely seen and understood.
7. If chaotic like me, break dreaded tasks down into bite sized chunks. And be forgiving on yourself if you miss doing a couple of these bite sized tasks or miss self-imposed deadlines. Shaming yourself is as counterproductive as shaming other people. If in contrast, you are hyper-organised and meticulous, try abandoning routine, set aside normal ways of working, and use different and weird materials in your art practice for a few days.
8. Find sayings or lists that your creative heroes have written. I have a fine set lurking in areas of my studio that jump out and scare away complacency at relevant times. Mine are by disparate artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Motherwell, and Philip Guston, to Bridget Riley, Amy Sillman and Graham Crowley.
9.Try to use materials that are not polluting or unsustainable where you can. I decided to only use linen to make up stretched canvases a few years ago (cotton uses vast amounts of water in its production), but this only lasted a short while as it was so expensive. I now use linen for smaller works and I’m generally working a lot smaller anyhow. I also use biodegradable materials most of the time.
10. Value, care for, support and acknowledge other artists around you. We do not exist in a vacuum as painters/sculptors/ musicians/writers. No art is made without drawing consciously or unconsciously on work made by both historic influences and our contemporary heroes: a myriad of other art practice and thinking constantly nourishes us. If you feel lost at certain points in time, the likelihood is that others will experience this same feeling, so be conscious of how people are presenting, or when someone has gone quiet for a while and reach out to them.