The art world – part deux

Yeah, getting fed up with the art world or actually with all the conventions, following and people making it generally difficult to be different. I have mentioned this before in different forms: People limit freedom.

People around you influence, decide, create and eliminate opportunities for you. If you don’t follow the program, you will cost you more energy to get somewhere, because to get somewhere you need people and they don’t understand you or your journey because you or your journey is different. So doing things different makes you loose on all kind of benefits and help from others. Life.

The art world isn’t different. It works in the same way as everything else. It is full of creative thinkers, people that do different stuff, but they are all pushed in the same mould of how to be a professional artist. So I am not a university graduate and I am a self-taught artist. I am 30+ years old, I don’t make paintings and I don’t make conceptual artworks.

-So I won’t be labeled as something up and coming ‘just from university’ and won’t be accepted to workshops to get those people going.

- I am older than 30 years, so not considered young anymore and won’t be eligible for lots of stimulating money. Age does influence and it is weird, because if there is one profession where people get better when they are old, it is being an artist. It is even easier to do when you have well passed retirement age than almost any other profession.

- I make sculptures; so all the venues with wall-based facilities are very difficult and only useful for my skulls, which sometimes scare people.

- I also don’t make installations or conceptual stuff, so if I finally have found a venue where 3D artwork is accepted, they want these half finished sculptures with elaborated art statements that 20% of the viewers think they understand while actually 0.03% of the viewers get it.

Yes, another rant on all the things that limits me in my progress! It is one of those reasons why I have this blog, to get these things of my chest and create positive things completely against all odds. People determine the odds. Because of that, I hate people and need them at the same time.

But sometimes you find people and organizations that don’t really care about these things; they just want to support someone who can make good art. One of those is the Brewery art Centre in Kendal. They want to stimulate people like me to develop further in my work as an artist.

So of to find more people that can help on my journey and forget about the narrow minded in this industry.