This is one of those days where I get really frustrated
about how the world works, clearly ignited by the everyday struggle of an
artist. Generally, people wouldn’t advise you to show weakness, difficulty or
failure because it makes you look bad and people have to have this shiny image
of you in order to make them by your work. Why? If you have this shiny image
they will assume you actually are going for the stars in an incredible speed, breaking
the sound barrier on the go and convince them they will become rich when they
sell your work 10 years later. They trust that you are honest and want to
believe that your journey will help them. ...or that your journey confirms that they can follow a dream too!
Trust in honesty, really? In a world where big corporations
are manipulating us, banks engineer hidden charges, people setting up scams by
mailing you? Yeah, so everybody creates this shiny image, mostly not by lying,
but by leaving the failures out. If you think about it, this is quite ok,
because why would you put energy in showing your failures? Fair enough, but
people are in my opinion in a grey to black area when it comes to a polished
truth about their success. For example; An artist might post a tweet ‘I have
just sold 3 paintings!’, with enough hashtags to enclose 3.000 sheep. This
artist might forget to mention that these paintings are 3 inch by 3 inch, sold
for 5 pounds each to the same person and took him/her 3 hours per painting to
complete. Wow!
The only subjects on the Internet where people express
negative feelings are medical or complaints about companies.
I also know that small successes are big when you try to
make it as an artist. Artists struggle and when I am not frustrated and see
people hyping their stuff, I actually find it funny and sad. When I think about
it, mainly sad that this is the way the world works, a world where we don’t
take risks and tend to follow others like obedient sheep and trust the hype in
its honesty and follow it. Those that do take risks only come in the spotlight when
they are a success, weirdly telling people, that don’t like to take a risk,
that there is no risk in taking risks…. Follow me? Well, just think about all
those books that pop up before Christmas about success stories of people
fighting their way up. People love those, but remember, with every success
story there are 10 failures. Perhaps not complete failures, but ones that just had
moderate success. The difference between book-writing-success and just scraping
by, is generally luck, assuming that you work hard and have talent.
I have always gone my own way as long as I remember and I have
discovered that going a different way takes more energy, society works like
that. Now that I have started at sea level again a few years back, I am at a
point where I by default have to follow a way on my own. No artists in the
family, no teachers at art college, no hyped status of being a young emerging
artist just because you graduated, nobody to guide me, just me. I also have only a small network of friends that might help and support because I moved to a different country. So who am I? Am I
a talented artist or am I a financial controller that made a stupid decision to quit
his job? Who would quit their paying job and dive into the unknown and uncertain? No sheep in its right mind would ever do that! So
here I am again climbing up from the bottom and I now have the feeling I am
halfway. I have successfully overcome several obstacles, exhibited regularly in
different cities and have had a lot of compliments from people about how
different and refreshing my work is. I seriously feel things are starting to move, but I am still not where I want to be and strangely, having progressed, makes rejections more frustrating because I don’t understand why.*
I think it hasn’t always got to do with the quality of my work. It
could be that my work doesn’t fit their landscapes-of-The-Lake-District kind of profile, but it could also have a more
subjective reason. This reason could be the path I choose to get where I am now, without any background in art. 'How can this guy make good art without listening to the teachers everybody else listens to?'** 'I might not be the best curator, but come on surely art can't come from the mind of a former financial controller?!' I
have no proof of that of course and it could be my frustrated imagination. Frustration I just have to express, risking any chance of hyping me, the emerging artist.... uch... because I don't have this blog for search engine optimisation or selling my work, I have this blog to get all this shit out of my system, continue to make funny and positive sculptures that make people smile every time I show them during exhibitions where the curator does appreciate different stuff from and I'll remember all of you that approach me and my work in a positive way without quietly ignoring me!
....next week I'll have finished a really cool sculpture!
* You often don't get a rejection, your are just ignored.
** That could actually be the problem, mweeeeh, mweeeh (pretend to make the sound of a lamb)
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