Ok, so you’re creative, you’re an ‘Artist’—-the kind that makes art. (At the first Illustration Conference in 1999, Illustrator Brad Holland declared something to the effect that…“Today, everyone is an Artist; dog groomers, hair cutters, and cake decorators—-the only people most definitely NOT Artists are Illustrators.”) Put down that icing nozzle, Brad said that, not me. Atleast in 2023, the ‘Art’ chasm has closed even for Illustrators. So, yeah we’re Artists too!
Back to the diagram, that blue dot is you or me, or whoever else is stubborn enough to have decided that making Art is a critical part of their life. We measure achievement through steps, levels, points, likes, followers, fans, …the reach of your post, picture, video, or story. But this social economy of attention and engagement is exhausting and performative. It doesn’t sustain us because it has its own appetite, we are being consumed as we consume.
Not the good kind of consumption, no Jungian Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail, symbol of the integration and assimilation of the shadow. We have unleashed a monster offering up our worst impulses for inciting catastrophe and mayhem. The promise of human flourishing that our connected world was supposed to offer us has run aground in a cacophony of noise and static that makes the biblical Babel story seem like prophecy rather than fable.
In art class we talk a lot about process, mistakes, and failure as a necessary part of moving our work….I almost said it—-forward. We are essentially battling our own brains and the hard-wired metaphors of struggling upward, soaring to new heights, and climbing the ladder of success. Insert stock photo of a staircase here.
Cognitive scientist John Vervaecke shared a study in a recent talk, that found that people chose predictable unhappiness over unpredictable happiness. We are our own worst enemies, and creatures of habit. Art school is as much about breaking your habits and preconceived certainties as it is developing a purpose for making art.
So, enough with the mountains to climb and the steps to achieve, allow yourself some perspective and just move. A move can be a simple mark on a blank sheet of paper, nudge yourself and the move will happen and the orbit will carry you. The orbit isn’t forward or back it is both discovery and memory.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time…”
T. S. Eliot Little Giddings 1943