Whenever someone asks me what I do, I still cringe because I can’t bring myself to say that I’m an artist. I don’t think that would change even if I were making a great deal of money, which I am not. (I don’t even exhibit any more. Not sure why. I think I just don’t care if anyone ever sees it.)
But I began making an inventory of all the work in my studio a couple of months ago, and I’m still not finished. There are hundreds of prints and paintings here, and probably thousands of drawings. There are thousands of photographs, some for reference, some artworks in their own right, all stuffed into albums and boxes or tucked away on multiple hard-drives. Lately I’ve started adding sound and video.
I like art and writing, and I’m bad at everything else. I’m bad at incredibly fundamental things like emotions and personal relationships. I genuinely cannot process anything except in terms of how I might record or cannibalise or transfigure the experience into Work somehow, because nothing else feels real or valid. I can’t use the word, but I am this thing, to a debilitating extent.
I might not be able to call myself an artist, but this is literally all I do.
I was sorting through yet another pile of jumbled scraps in the studio this evening, and I was surprised that there was so much beauty there. I felt that familiar quickening, like sap rising in the spring, that made me want to paint again. Not that I’ve been idle; I’ve been busy with other things. But still, it feels like I’m coming back to myself.
Blue sky today. At long last, I think summer’s coming.
I think secretly I’ve always been afraid that I would be found out somehow, that someone would realise I’m not a “real” artist, and then I would realise it too, and the whole world would suddenly become a terrible, inhospitable vacuum, because I don’t have anything else to shore up the flimsy edifice of my identity.
I suppose I finally realised that I don’t need to worry about that. This isn’t just a thing I do sometimes. It’s twisted up in the core of me, fused into my sensory cells, as much a part of how I move through the world as my fucking optic nerves. For better or worse. I can’t take my own feelings seriously. Every story I hear, every bit-player in my solitary life, is just fodder for some theme I’ll get around to working on someday. I make aesthetic judgements about everything I see, from roadkill to scar tissue. Even if I never made another painting, never picked up a pencil again, the way I perceive and analyse and assign value to information has been so thoroughly, irreversibly warped, I really do think there’s no going back.
So it’s okay.
It’s okay.
