This is the third part of a five-part series, released M-F this week, called “Artist’s Talk”.  You can read the previous parts and other pieces on my newsletter archives, here.  Enjoy - and please share with anyone you think would enjoy this piece and others like it, and encourage them to sign up with their email to receive the newsletter themselves.  Onto…

Artist’s Talk: Part 3 - Job Well-Done

As I grew older, pursuing various distractions and diversions, bending to my family’s wishes to not pursue artist as career, I did wonder - when would I become the artist, the full-time artist, that I always believed I would become?  Being an artist wasn’t my only dream; I had many dreams.  Sometimes the other dreams would manifest into wild pursuits, sports, loves, power games, communities, experiences, mentorships, all not necessarily taking me any closer to becoming an artist, but always leading to something, shaping who I am.  In 2018, at 32 years old, finally, I exhausted my patience for deferring the artist dream - the most intimidating and most important dream - and declared myself an artist, artist-as-career.

I had no plan other than to make a body of work, to make up for lost time.  I’d been painting, drawing for decades, but not with the frequency or rigor of someone who would call themselves an artist.  The label had been intimidating to me.  I always thought of myself as a person who draws, a person who loves to draw, not an “artist”.  Finally I was trying on the label, because I felt pressure to do so, to try to step aggressively and abruptly into my dream, and began making art at an absurd rate of production.  I calculated that if the conventional world supposedly “worked” forty hours a week, every week, I would draw and paint for that amount of hours, every week, 6-9 hours a day, 3 hours at a time.

My insecurities were driving my art-making.  I made work I barely believed in, some I did, but mostly just made a lot, like the writer who drives themselves to meet a certain word count a day in the name of improvement, banishing even the possibility of writers’ block, and rightly says to themselves at day’s end: “job well-done.”  I think of Jackson Browne’s song, “The Pretender”: “and when the evening rolls around, I go on home and lay my body down, and when the morning light comes streaming in, I get up and do it again, amen”.  Without meaning to, I had taken what was closest to my soul, the activity I had always done, always loved, always depended on and was always there for me (making art) - and asked (demanded) it become a job.  The art obliged.  It was now a job, barely anything more, and thoroughly exhausting.  I kept reaching for my art to sustain me, to make me money, and to give my soul what it desperately wanted - a sense of peace.  I kept reaching after the mechanics, the amount of money made, the hours a week drawn, and kept track like an actuary.  Damn the consequences, I thought, I’ll do this and through my rigidity something will come about by sheer willpower.

I worked those 6-9 hours a day of continuous art production, every day, for six months.  After six months, one day I couldn’t draw, and I sensed I’d made a mistake.  I had crushed (by design) the joy out of what I loved the most, and was now unable to pay for a lifestyle to sustain even basic things.  I’d had a dream that I could almost instantly “become” an artist by doing everything I thought an artist needed to do - make work, make good work, and sell it.  I thought the details would sort themselves out - that somehow the world would take notice of my art, and things would “take off” from there.  I didn’t account for the fact that the world doesn’t work that way.  Any of the talented people my age seem to have taken their art skill and drive and applied it to video games or movies - arenas where representational art skills are deeply valued, taught, sought after, and compensated.  Popular visual culture is no longer tied to painting or the importance of painting especially with regard to the techniques and practices my work engages with.  I knew this, but had chosen, maybe unconsciously, to ignore it.

While Seattle may have once been an Arts City, it was no longer regarded as such, with good reason.  These days it’s a strain to even see Seattle as a cultural hub, unless you can count the creep of tech and gentrification as culture.  I grew up in Seattle as its mythology was already on its way out.  I was too young to really even be interested in Pearl Jam or Nirvana until well after the peak of their cultural relevance.  In Seattle today, cultural relevance is becoming supplanted by a cynicism that I hear in contemporary conversations and media.  I can’t stand cynicism - to me it is the same as giving up.  How do you keep going, keep after a dream, when everyone around you has already given up?

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Thank you for reading “Artist’s Talk: Part 3 - Job Well-Done”, and for your questions and comments about this newsletter and my work.  You are welcome to email me any time at David@DavidOSmithArtist.com, or simply reply to this email.  If you enjoyed reading this, I encourage you to share it with your networks, and to enogucarge them to sign up with their email to receive my newsletter, the best way to stay up to date with my artwork.

Tomorrow: Artist’s Talk: Part 4 - The Ships Bearing Their Dreams