Filling the Voids

I’ve had a notion recently to get back into a game that I turned my back on years ago.  Having never been one to come to things early, I don’t feel bad that the arc of this endeavor is so flat with a random spike here and there.  I will use the term art and its derivatives loosely throughout so be mindful of that.  As an artist, I’ve gone through various periods of excitement and disappointment, celebration and defeat, I suck at this – Holy shit I really am as good as I think I am.  It is probably as simple as traversing the stages of life but it is also possibly and more likely the nature of a periphery intellectual seed abandoned, seeking purchase in a barren, inhospitable soil.  I suppose most artists experience this phenomenon in varying degrees as the clocks tick, tick, tick. I imagine successful (rock star) artists navigate this roller coaster quickly and come to a realization or at least a position of satisfactory internal understanding before they declare themselves in public an artist and take the big first / final step – the sell.  For me, this roller coaster is coasting into the gate (25) years after the fact and that’s fine.  I mentioned the late to the party thing, right? 

Selling one’s art has always been a bit troubling for me.  I’ve sold art before.  I’ve collected modest sums of sweaty cash from clueless tourists selling art, bad art most often.  The trouble with selling is that you give away a piece of your soul.  It’s giving in the most profound metaphysical sense even if you do pocket a handful of bones.

I’ve given away the best work I’ve ever done because I was convinced that was the purpose of art.  For 99.99% of my life phase I thought art was only something that I did for myself or others, personally in both cases.  For the last ½ of 1% of my life I have discovered (finally, like a mental patient, I know) that I make art because I freaking love art – end of list.  That's enough for me.  That alone makes me an artist.  The last few weeks have been the most satisfying of my life artistically and I haven’t even made a stroke or a line or even given so much as a flirtatious glance to the smoking hot piece of art I might create if I could pry my elephantine intellect from its own luxurious logical sedentary couch.  I’ve been soaking up my own judgment and belief for maybe the first time in my life, dissecting and accepting and celebrating the clamor, eavesdropping on the nonsense that reverberates inside the gymnasium of my cavernous empty / crowded skull…listening to, internalizing my own internal, validating my own validity. Teaching myself to learn the long-learned / forgotten lessons I have taught myself and forgotten over the last (25) years about what art is – about who and what I am.  Remembering why I ever resolved to pick up a brush and push cheap paint across the bottom of an empty Budweiser case box when I was (15).  Remembering to be a human being, to let myself feel, to express, to inhale and exhale publicly, to speak with a purpose, to be solid in every manner the man that I am and to accept it – as fantastical and full of shit as it might be. 

If it's who I am then I should be exactly that.  Odd that it took (40) years for me to become comfortable in my own artistic skin but that's how it is, so there's that. 

Obvious questions persist.  Will I paint my heart or make a quick buck?  Can I do both?  How far am I willing to take this?  What if I really do suck?  Does it matter?  Do I want to be good or sellable? Is there a difference?   I want to be both, of course.  So I won’t allow myself to choose.  The choice is only will I keep it inside for (20+) more years or will I go public again.  I’ve been tangled in the web for so long that I have never truly allowed myself to give it much thought until now – I have a helluva lot of ideas in my head and I have only so much space on my walls.  It could be that simple.  I’m not foolish enough to allow myself to imagine myself as a working artist, but what I do is good and that’s freedom personified.

So in the spirit of giving, here is the first piece of this new-found personal freedom (enjoy – it will cost you mad $s next time):

I’m not sure that it is either sellable or good and frankly tonight I don’t really care because it’s mine.  It’s an obvious nod to a Brit band that you’ve never heard of (or forgot) called The Godfathers circa 1987-88 or thereabouts.  You didn’t think it was all metal for me did you?  Actually, it was exactly that until my brother turned me on to these guys and a few others around about the time I said. The song is about whatever it is about (you don’t have to be a genius): my piece is about the in betweens though, the voids between the demarks.  I’ve devoted a lot more mental energy to #3 than I have the others in this list and certainly more than I ever did the in betweens.  In so doing, I’ve ensured nothing more than an empty, forgettable #4.  But I can change that – the past is prologue, right? It is the in betweens that matter and what I've too often neglected.  What occurs between peaks is the gravy, man.  That’s where life really gets there, where you can truly feel a pulse.  Living is how you choose it sure, but life happens on random Thursdays at 3:47 in the afternoon when you think nobody is watching and you are envisioning what Friday evening might become. 

Filling the voids defines the solid.

Good time sunshine.  Fantastic.  Me.