My dad had a close friend, a titan in business who also shared a love of art. Even more striking than this friend’s achievements were his understatement, sincerity, fairness and friendship. Everyone he knew felt enriched for knowing him. After quizzing him on his secret, Dad’s friend said merely, “Life is relationships.”
My dad soon passed along a purpose-built advice-nugget to me. “Like life,” he said, “art is loving and connecting with others.”
I’m frequently asked whether it’s best to go back to school or back to work. I’ve been on the board of directors of a prominent art college, and I’ve also been an advocate of do-it-yourself for life — so I’m coming from both sides of the fence. Fact is, even if you attend what you think is the best art school in the world (like I did — Art Center) it doesn’t make you into an artist. You’re the one who has to do that.
An art photographer friend recently revealed she was emerging from a six-month fog. “Clients put my personal work on hiatus. I was in such a creative block I just dove into helping others and forgot about myself,” she said. “I got stuck in fear.” I asked her if she were to put her fears into words, what would be her Top 3? “Me?” she asked. “Okay, here goes:
“Fear of no one caring, or my work being worthless.
The following is part of a letter from an artist to an architect friend: “I asked him for some of the money I need to continue my work. He told me to come around on Monday. I went on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and there was no money. On Friday someone else came to the door and threw me out. I’m discouraged about getting paid for this job.”
Sound familiar? The date on the letter is May 2, 1506. The artist was Michelangelo and the patron was Pope Julius II.
When Guillermo del Toro was growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico in the early 1970s, he started fooling around with his dad’s Super 8 camera, making horrors using his Planet of the Apes action toys and other objects he found around the house. Borrowing from the Magic Realism of his strict Catholic upbringing, Guillermo’s fascination with allegory and fairytales grew into a full-fledged obsession with the power and potential of monsters to tell the forgotten stories of the dispossessed.
An artist who wishes to remain anonymous wrote, “I recently moved into a new house that came fully decorated. In addition to selling most of the furnishings to make room for my own, I found myself with other people’s paintings. After searching online for the artists and coming up empty-handed, I’m wondering what to do. While I respect the creative effort, I want to hang my own stuff. Any ideas?”
A subscriber wrote, “Recently I’ve been asked for a painting as a wedding present, as a birthday present, and as a keepsake. Of course all these requests, while flattering, take time or cost money. What does one say? I recently asked my brother-in-law to pose for me while we chatted over a beer. He was disappointed when I told him I needed the sketches. Am I obligated to give him one? My colleague asked me to paint her portrait. Thinking she meant commission, I said I’d love to but she thought it would be my gift for her birthday. What does one do?”
When Amy Sherald was growing up in Columbus, Georgia in the 1970s, her dentist father encouraged her to go into medicine. “There was this attitude of, ‘The civil rights movement was not about you being an artist,’ ” she remembered. But as an introvert, Amy enjoyed painting and running and, unsure of what else she was good at, she felt drawn to a life in art. “I don’t feel like I chose to do it,” she said. Near the end of her MFA, during a medical check-up, Amy’s doctors told her that she had a barely-functioning heart and that she would eventually need a transplant. She was 30 years old.
Painters paint, writers write, and sculptors make a lot of chips. No matter what our disciplines, these are the facts of successful creativity. Today I’d like to go a little deeper into the “doing” part of what we do. It’s about the basic unit of our work.
The “art unit” is a piece of art, finished and signed. It’s the best you can do today. It isn’t the motif, the stroke or the passage. It isn’t the word, the phrase, the idea, or the plot — it’s the job.
Last weekend we hit the highway and pulled up to a storefront in a nearby coastal city. Inside sprawled an art space where a handful of artists mingled beneath a barrel ceiling lit to the hilt before taking their places for a panel discussion. The gallerist, prepared with notes and video, dangled questions about background, motivation and process while we cast our glances around the room at one another’s work.