Dear Art Lover,

This is Part 4 of 5 in a series called “Opportunities”.  I’ll be sharing one part each day, concluding with part 5 of 5 this Friday.  You can read the previous parts and many more writings on the Newsletter Archive section of my website, here.  Onto…

Opportunities, Part 4 of 5: In Routine and Repetition, Freedom

At this point, as my application skills are starting to improve, that improvement drives a little bit of enjoyment.  Always up for a challenge, it’s not a chore to be asked to rationalize 20 years of continuous art-making in 40 images and 500 words and a 4-page CV.  I relish these strange uses of time.  Nothing could be a better breath of fresh air after continuous hours of laptop screen typing (my day, so far) than closing the screen and drawing and painting.  The immersion in the tedious digital copy-churning for context makes hours of drawing and painting feel light, free, easy.  And, of course, some of these opportunities, the residences in particular, are gateways to a brief period of time where the “fun part” of art-as-career takes over the lifestyle.  Spending hours here and there of art production around the business of art is very different than having the daylight hours to work, to draw, to paint, to push the work forward.  Three paintings a week can become three paintings a day.

Behind an outward appearance of enjoyment, ease, skill, production or playfulness, often there lies a mountain range of routines and repetition.  Certainly this is the case for the current stage of my art career.  Part of why I’m pushing to produce so much email communication this year is simply for the practice of doing it - to see what changes occur as a result of relentless writing, investigation, reflection, composing of thoughts.  I love writing, I love editing, and to access some of the more ambitious opportunities I am seeking, the level of material I’ve produced up to this point simply won’t cut it.  I didn’t go to art school, although I do have a design degree that is MFA-equivalent.  I’m about to turn 38 in February, and yet I am  competing (art isn’t a competition but art opportunities are!) in some cases with art students fresh off their insider-track name-brand art school pipelines.

In many very real ways, I doubt I will ever (even posthumously) be considered part of the “art world” but damned if I won’t try to break in as hard as I can, until I can’t anymore.  After all, I didn’t even decide to pursue art-as-career until a mere five years ago, fall of 2018, and I don’t consider the way I was doing it to be at all healthy or successful until spring of 2020.  I didn’t even consider really trying to apply to and land artist opportunities, at scale, until July of 2023.  If it looks like I’m sprinting, it’s because I am - I feel behind, because in many ways, I am behind.  This isn’t the whine of insecurity as much as the calm voice of asking myself how to rationally move this thing forward, in a sustainable way, forever.

What has been consistent (but not as much as it could have been) has been the work itself.  I’ve repeated the habit and practice of making artwork since as long as I can remember, well before ever believing this could be a “job” or that making art would have to become something I carve out time in my adult life to do.  The art itself is most important to me about all of this.  I put everything I have into trying to make the best artwork I possibly can.  Many times the results aren’t quite what I’m going for, but that’s what the next piece is for.  The gift of the auxiliary work, the business, the non-art-making job aspect (the competitive side, etc) is that it allows me the freedom to keep making art.

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Thus concludes “Opportunities, Part 4 of 5: In Routine and Repetition, Freedom”, the fourth part of the “Opportunities” Series.  You can read this and other writings on the Newsletter Archives section of my website, here.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s “Opportunities, Part 5 of 5:  Rub a Pug’s Ears”

As ever, if you haven’t already, sign up for email newsletters on my website, forward this to someone you think would enjoy it, and encourage them to sign up as well.

Cheers,

David