It’s how you are born. When all you can do is… Art.
Sometimes you grow up this way. Your Mother or Grandmother are artists. They teach you art.
It’s so much worse if it’s a combination of the two. Born artist and you have an artist Grandmother or Mother…
Waitress, retail, bartender, manager, cab driver, customer service, security, dog washer, courier, the list goes on and on… “Artist”, unfortunately has never been a title on it. Not for a very long time.
At the beginning of high school they ask you what you want to be.
I said “Artist”. It is what I already was, my Grandmother said so. She trained me, had been training me since birth. Acrylics, watercolor… Whatever. Oils and Encaustics were her specialty. Old Master style.
She (the counselor) looked at me in a sweet, patronizing way and says… “What about a career choice? Commercial art is a good one.”
At this point in my young life I had already been moved away from my warm, sunny, and tropical home, into a very cold and gray new world. My beloved Grandmother was too far away now to comprehend. I had no care whatsoever about this fruity woman sitting in front of me.
She didn’t realize, in the words of Ms. Erykah Badu, “I’m an artist, and I’m sensitive about my shit.”
I said “whatever.” She put it down in my permanent file…
Commercial art would be a field that I wouldn’t dabble in until way later on. A time when I began to think that counselor may have been right.
She wasn’t.
But we try.
Artist.
That counselor should have asked me if I had rich parents. She probably, correctly, assumed I did not.
There are two very different kinds of artists in this world. Those with the money to fuel their passions, and those without.
There is a kid at Burger King who can paint like Michelangelo. The old maintenance man who sings like Pavarotti. A waitress who can tap dance all over the restaurant. An opera singer, found homeless and mad on the street.
We are a world that competes with itself. Without intense emotion, there is no art. Where to find that intense emotion when you feel nothing, can lead you to the brink of death. Or madness. So it is.
Capitalism, industrialism, war, health… Art is still there, but used. Chained to a chair with a pen in their hand, the artist renders what the corporation wants…
A closet, chock full of artists on hangers, like Gucci bags in a Kardashian closet.
Mental illness in its many forms, ghosts that won’t go away… Clinging to those things you remember so much brighter than anything else. Memories like cliffs to keep you from falling into the abyss.
You start out fine. They let you alone to study. Read the trees and clouds. Discover the intricate balances in humans. Watch the lights and shadows move across the world…
Then the push begins. The push to join the world. Leave God’s great bosom and pay bills. Buy food. Maintain life.
If you are not well established, here is where it starts to fall apart.
The downfall. It may be slow. Depression, anxiety attacks. Chaos may ensue. Job loss, homelessness, drunken psychotic binges, and all to show for it is some really great, totally obsolete… Art.
Sit it on the sidewalk against the wall. Maybe someone will steal it. Validation. No place to put it anyways.
Reliant on other artists for salvation. One whose music, poems or paintings can restore the soul or inspire.
Both impoverished and revered, the artist walks between many worlds, but it is this one that hurts the most…
The artist exposes things that do not want to be seen.
In times of duress, society does not want the artist. We do not want artists who can only create things as they see them. All those songs and works of anarchy, misery, and pain. The interdimensional mirror.
No one wants to see. Not until the sun is shining again.
So they cut the funds, drive out the teachers and privatize the art world. Cut it right out of the middle and high schools where budding artists are just learning to fly. Discourage the naturals…
Turn the coffeehouses into Starbucks. Create Renoirs with AI.
Agendas extend far into the future. Futures meant for no dissension.
The human race needs art and real artists to render it. From cave paintings to architecture. Culture, shows that we are human, and art is culture, recording humanity.