Art is a job where you’re the boss, you’re the employee, and you’re the janitor. The first accomplishment is simply to be productive all week without a paycheck -- there might be several of these. Artists sometimes dream, limos and steam heat, attention and fame, respect and paid bills, but dreams can be confusing. So much about art is just hype, it’s difficult to know what to believe. In any case, dreams don’t do the drudgery of prepping for the act of art. For the independent artist, semi-maniacal compulsion is much more efficient, and a modicum talent comes in handy.
The first thing the artist needs is studio space. The kitchen table can be used but there will be conflicts, stuff getting moved, thrown away, it’s inconvenient.
Adequate would be a studio with a door, a bit of plumbing, maybe room for a cot -- excellent daylight would be extra. Supplies beyond student grade are always expensive, but the costliest component is time, since an unoccupied studio is just dead weight. Stealing time while working for wages sometimes involves periods of voluntary unemployment, bouts of creative accounting, and foraging for any assistance just laying around, applying for grants like playing the lotto, although the odds be less.
So somehow the artist is being productive, converting raw material, fabric and pigment, into their own personal statement -- ‘ain’t nobody allowed to play the blues like this but me.’ It took a few years of practice and a mountain of raw material reused over and over, to be finally thrown away, all an investment in a future less than guaranteed. The artist is resourceful, finding cheap rent and best deals, being frugal about living expenses, gentle and considerate of aging vehicles, and lucky in locating professionals willing to trade services for art, real but rare, or they wouldn’t be artists at all. An artist is a little monad of capitalism, sailing a one person dingy in the great ocean of commerce, run over and lost in the wake of billion dollar enterprise, credit card debt, gentrification, and all such as that, bobbing up again, or not.
There is one last foot of bridge the artist can’t construct on their own, the final connection beyond their power to complete, and no, it isn’t oodles of sales. It’s being seen at all. That’s right. The subsidized crowd favors assemblage as a form, and are a cinch to approve of anything fearlessly confirming current social complaints. Turns out they’re the ones who control access to those well-lit non-profit galleries the city maintains for its citizens. They all share a mission, edifying the community primarily by pretending conceptual art is a thing. Area artists look to hang elsewhere, in salons and restaurants, in bakeries and coffeehouses, any wall space where their work can be seen.
Dreams of solvency have to wait for the moment some unsuspecting customer at the five and dime looks up to suddenly recognize the true humanity in the little painting there by the gum machine, and then reaches in their pocket to pay for it. That’s a first improbable step toward one day feeling relaxed in the studio, content with a day’s work, justified in the sacrifice and respected for the journey, instead of harried by bills, ridden with guilt for meager provision, and being labeled a ‘dreamer’ by family and friends. It’s pretty slim. In the end all they want, old artists, after long struggle with the medium itself, finding a voice and singing their song, is ‘a clean, well-lighted place,‘ preferably with small halogen spots, pure white light, above each work of art, retrospective of where they’ve been and how far they’ve come.
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