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Discovering Art, Part 4 of 5: Paralysis This is the fourth of a series of emails this week, 5 in total, M-F. You can read parts one two and three, here. In graduate school I fell off, art-wise. I was in Design school, not art school, and what little art I did make did not substantially further my practice, in any discipline. I could still draw the figure, and did a little bit of that when I could, but the majority of my art production was in the design studio, applied towards a Masters in Landscape Architecture. I did get fairly decent at drawing trees and topographic lines, and building landscape models. After grad school, in 2011 and 2012, I took up some art again, but it was mostly working from photographs. I did very few plein air pieces, and I did not feel connected to my art in the way I once had. I looked at old work, thinking, am I even capable of doing that now? Will I become an artist, eventually, or something else? The Summer of 2018 I was in the UK, and was reminded in the London galleries what real art looks like, how incredibly masterful some of my artistic inspirations were, and felt the pain, in a visceral way, of knowing 1. How important being an “artist” was to my identity and 2. How so very far I was from living that identity. So, back in Seattle, Fall 2018, with no plan, no design, I set to work: full-time art. I put myself on an insane schedule, 6-9 hour days of studio art production, M-F, sometimes weekends too. I was, quite literally, forcing myself to draw and/or paint (almost entirely in a darkened studio) all day, every day, until at the end of the day I dropped. It was extremely rigorous, and for a while, I felt like I was onto something. I thought I’d even return to plein air watercolor, so I did, getting outside, still making a graphite underdrawing, and painting for several hours (not several days and weeks) on a scene. Between that and working from photographs, my work started to improve, but something else was afoot, too. I started to feel… off. I started to not enjoy making art at the rate I was doing it. I started to dislike the projects I had taken on (the commissioned work), and to question the sustainability of what I was doing. Yes, this way of working generated attention and business too, but most importantly… I wasn’t enjoying myself, at all. In fact, I was killing the fun out of the thing I love more than anything in the world, drawing and painting. I was turning my passion into a chore, a joyless, unsustainable task to be hammered away at, come hell or high water. One day it all came to a stop. I went into the studio, exhausted, and started to draw - I couldn’t. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to draw, I had had plenty of days of pushing through fatigue or motivation with discipline. This was different. There was a physical impossibility of drawing. I tried, for hours. I sat with the pencil in my hand and tried to force “drawing” to happen. I tried to change projects. I felt like my vision was off, like the motor skills in my hand, and my ability to perceive and give information about how to move, like it was never there, like I’d never drawn anything, like I had no business doing this. I looked around. I lived and worked in the rented basement of a house, no windows, with an expensive rent to pay. I’d been surviving, if not comfortably, solely on the income from my art practice, commissions and sales. I panicked - if I can’t draw, how will I pay to live here? How will this work? I tried to set these concerns aside, but a week went by of this, and I realized, oh no, this project has failed. I’ll skip over a few details here - but if we are to meet in person, I welcome you to ask about them, if you are at all curious about what it looks like to fail completely, especially with something you love. I suspect many of us can relate. Check your inbox tomorrow (Friday) for Discovering Art, Part 5 of 5: Building Community I’ve been told by people reading these emails that they enjoy receiving them. If you do, I’d ask that you think, right now, of one other person who might enjoy them as well, forward this message to them, and ask them to consider signing up with their email on my website. Cheers, David
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