Redtree Times

Pablo Picasso– Seated Harlequin, 1901

“I wrote to Picasso once: I did not receive a reply. I saw Picasso at a party or an opening or something crowded and awful in New York. I spoke to him. I repeated what I had written in my letter: How do we do it? What do we do when the images and the words do not come forth? How do we survive? How do we remain artists? He looked at me with those glorious eyes, snapped back that shiny, bald head and told me that we are not artists; we do not concern ourselves with ‘art.’ We are workmen, day laborers–who happen to work with paints and clay and actors, and curtains part on occasion to display what we do. Tell the truth, he said. As you know it. Art may happen; it may not. We are not owed its presence. His point was made.”

–Tennessee Williams/Interview with James Grissom/New Orleans/1982

I still cringe a bit when I tell people that I’m an artist. It seems presumptuous to take on that label or to assume that I am creating art at any time. How do I know if my work reaches the level of art? Can anyone ever say with certainty that they are creating art?

I am much more comfortable with the definition Picasso put forward to Tennessee Williams in the passage above.

Workman.

Day Laborer.

Though I believe it does in many cases, the question of whether whatever I do reaches the level of being categorized as art is out of my hands. I just do what I do and hope for the best. Keep my head down and work at expressing a truth as a I know it with the hope that someone sees something in it that sparks some feeling in them.

But, as Picasso pointed out, art may happen; it may not. We are not owed its presence.

I reflect on the fact that I am in my 25th year of doing this as a full-time day laborer in this field and I realize what a leap of faith it has been to keep doing this year after year with the hope that something approaching art will be produced, never knowing if art will deign to attach its label to my work.

Like Picasso, I know that it doesn’t matter. I just have my appointed tasks before me each day and I do them as best I can.

And maybe that is where the art begins, in continuing to diligently work each day, year after year, with the dogged belief that there is something in the work beyond myself. Something to be expressed, to be seen and transmitted.

Maybe it is in the whole of it that art approaches. Maybe it comes in pure persistence, in finding meaning in both those grace-filled days when the work comes effortlessly and on those days when the work feels like Sisyphus pushing his rock up that steep hill.

Maybe it is the accumulation of time and effort and thought and desire.

Maybe not.

Who am I to say?

I just work here.

Though I see myself as a worker and not a prisoner, this song feels right for the morning. It’s a historic Alan Lomax recording of a prison work song from Parchman Farm, a former plantation turned maximum security prison in Mississippi. This is Early in the Mornin’.