Reprieve

I've been on a month-long leave from the day job; today was the day I was supposed to return. I took it so that I could spend a good chunk of time painting, to try and get a little bit ahead with my work. But the composition of my Tacoma Art Museum symposium talk took way, way more time than I expected. It was worth it in the long run - it went very well - but it took up three-quarters of my time off. So I asked my supervisors at work if I could have two more weeks, and they thankfully said yes. So now begins the two more weeks.

Besides just wanting to get more time to paint, the other reason for taking the leave was to try and figure out what it would be like to be a full-time artist, the life-style of the thing. I don't know that I'm really all that near to making that transition, but I still wanted to see how much work I could really produce if I didn't have to go to another job. And, maybe more importantly, to see if I could get an idea of the balance I could strike with art-making and non-art-making time. No artist can just sit and make art all the time. Even without having to break to go to a day job, you still have a life that needs to be integrated with the time used for art-making. And if I spent all my time painting, I'd just go nuts. So what would a balance look like? I hope to get some sense of that in the next two weeks.

Finished and ready to roll

I think I'm finally done pulling at and tweaking my presentation for this Sunday's symposium, The Figure in Contemporary Art, at the Tacoma Art Museum. Approximately forty minutes and one-hundred and eighty some powerpoint images in length, putting this together has nearly done me in. I've been saying, maybe if I had gone to art school - any college, really - I might have had to put together this sort of thing, learned how it works. But I came to this completely unprepared and ignorant.

How to you tell everything you think about your art? How you developed as an artist? Your feelings and thoughts about art, in general? I've taken a month-long leave from work to get ahead with my painting and here I am, three weeks in, and all I've been working on is this presentation. Working on it day and night. Not sleeping very well. Alright, I'm obsessive.

I mentioned to G the other night that I'd been thinking recently about how weird it would be if either one of us was with someone who wasn't as obsessed with their work as both of us are. Someone who wouldn't work and work until they finally felt they'd got it right, like we do. Someone who said, "Oh, that's good enough", when it wasn't, really. "No sweat." "It doesn't really matter." I can't imagine. In a lot of ways, it would probably be much healthier to not be so fixated on "getting it right". But what G and I both work at isn't a group effort, where the individual isn't always crucial to the end product. If you're writing something or painting something that only you can do, that is so personal and singular that, in a way, it says who you are, how do you find an easy place to compromise?

Well, anyway, I think I've got this thing together as best I can. G has been an enormous help, reading and listening and watching. She even skipped class last week so she could help me edit. She's been wonderfully tough, and I've made almost every single cut she suggested - and very happy for it, too. She'll sit again, tonight, while I run through the whole thing once more; it might be the last time before the actual event. It feels good to be on this side of the process. I'm nervous, of course, but I'm looking forward to Sunday.

And, now, what I really need is a manicure!

Writing when you have to

I'm nearing the deadline for finishing the talk that I'll be giving at the symposium at the Tacoma Art Museum on April 3rd. And, I have to say, it's proving to be rather a tough job. Since I'll by talking about my art, much of the presentation will be visual, but I still need to have enough material to go on for forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes! Oh....

Though the theme of the symposium - which is in conjunction with the big Norman Rockwell exhibition at TAM - is the figurative in art, I'll end up speaking of other things as well. One of the thoughts rolling around in my head right now is the idea of "art for the art world" versus "people's art". Norman Rockwell was certainly a people's artist. That's one of the qualities, I believe, that made serious, critical attention and appreciation so slow to come; he wasn't seen as "serious" enough, his work is so straightforward and accessible. That's one area where I think our work has parallels.

I'm lucky that my career has come at a time when critics and the art establishment are increasingly more open minded about what kind of art can be taken seriously. But I still think my work is appreciated even more by the "average Joe". And though to be able to sell my work, I need to access a different layer of society, shall we say, I think - maybe unconsciously - I still aim my output at the less-art-educated majority. I'm not talking down to that audience. We appreciate the same things; their sensibilities are mostly my own. And they get my work as well, if not better, than the art-educated minority. The way I look at it, my work - with all its historicist excess, its gender tweaking, its unabashed prettiness - isn't meant to be thought over too deeply, just to be enjoyed. For its clear language and its "too utterly utter" preposterous pretensions. It's probably equally outrageous of me to say so, but I've come to think of my visual style as "elitism for the masses". And I hope it is.