The Passing Parade— Now at the Principle Gallery
It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.
–Raymond Carver, A Storyteller’s Shoptalk, New York Times (1981)
I am in the midst of a deep funk, a depressive event that comes on the heels of every show or gallery talk. Every show or talk–good, bad, or indifferent. It’s just the way it is. I think it’s a blend of several things.
One is simply being worn down with the effort of both creation and promotion. The promoting part– this blog, for example– becomes difficult and depleting just before and after each event.
Another is in creating unrealistic expectations for the event. This is especially true when I have stronger than normal feelings about the work.
Some of it comes in questioning my own efforts. Did I do enough? Did I break new ground? Or the simple but deadly– Am I good enough?
Some of it comes from second-guessing my interactions with people. In her diary, author Anaïs Nin described very much what I go through after any event:
I have never described, even in the diary, the act of self-murder which takes place after my being with people. A sense of shame for the most trivial defect, lack, slip, error, for every statement made, or for my silence, for being too gay or too serious, for not being earthy enough, or for being too passionate, for not being free, or being too impulsive, for not being myself or being too much so.
You add in the deadline for the show being met which means that an endpoint, a destination, has been reached. It seems as though it should be a time to feel free but for a short time after each event, I feel unmoored, without direction, until a new destination is put in place.
These post-show depressions usually find me questioning what I do and the choices I have made. The questions that usually satisfies and begins to put me back on course comes by asking myself if I am painting the paintings I want or need to see. Am I doing work that is mine alone?
For the answer to those questions, I am going to continue here with a blog entry that has ran a couple of times here, the last time being in early 2020. The painting at the top of the original post has been switched out for one, The Passing Parade, from my current Entanglement exhibit at the Principle Gallery— still promoting!— which satisfies now what I wrote then. I have also added the passage at the top from the late Raymond Carver. It’s another one of those quotes about writing where one can easily substitute artist for writer. It very much ties into the idea of painting the paintings you want to see for me. Or to create the world in which you wish to live, to put it another way.
Here’s that earlier blog post:
This painting really captivates me on a personal level and reminds me of a thought that once drove me forward as a younger painter. It’s a thought that I often pass along as a bit of advice to aspiring artists:
Paint the paintings you want to see.
Sounds too simple to be of any help, doesn’t it? But that simplicity is the beauty and strength of it.
For me, I wasn’t seeing the paintings out there that satisfied an inner desire I had to see certain deep colors that were being used in a manner that was both abstract and representative. If I had seen something that fulfilled these desires, I most likely would not have went ahead as a painter. I wouldn’t have felt the need to keep pushing.
It was this simple thought that marked the change in my evolution as a painter. Before it, I was still trying to paint the paintings that I was seeing in the outer world, attempting to emulate those pieces and styles that already existed as created by other artists. But it was unsatisfying, still echoing the work of others, forever judged in comparison to these others.
But after the realization that I should simply paint what I wanted to see, my work changed, and I went from a bondage to that which existed to the freedom of what could be found in creating something new. For me, that meant finding certain colors such as the deep reds and oranges tinged with dark edges that mark this piece. It meant trying to simplify the forms of world I was portraying so that the colors and shapes collectively took on the same meditative quality that I was seeing in each of them.
In my case this seems to be the advice I needed. But I think it’s advice that works for nearly anything you might attempt.
Paint the paintings you want to see.
Write the book you want to read. Toni Morrison said this very thing at one point.
Play the music you want to hear. Make the film you want to see. Cook the food you want to eat. Make the clothes you want to wear.
Make the world in which you want to live.
Simple.
Now go do it.
It was good advice then and it still is now. Time for me to claw my way out of this hole. Paint toward the light…
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