The Fragmented Art/Life

I have been thinking lately: 

How I get stuck trying to make new work. (Sometimes.)

And I don’t apply for awards.

And why.

Because I look at my work like I look at other people’s work—with enough baseline criticality to know its weaknesses, from a bird’s eye view. I know the weakness of my work, which is that I love to draw. I can draw like a little drawing machine all day, even if the drawing is not world-changing, clever, or even good.

My weakness is I love to draw.

I often think ahead to my deathbed and wonder: if I were to die today would I be regretful of how I lived my days, drawing this way? Drawing without producing. (Not anti-capitalist per se, but not productive in the sense that it fails to meet a certain quality as commodity?) When I think ahead to those final moments, I always feel reassured that I would be ok with my machine-drawing ways. Because, somewhere inside the insect-mechanical-pleasure-pod part of my brain, I was made to draw.

Sounds silly, but it’s true: I get obscene pleasure from laying down graphite.

I should make probably abstractions.

Thick, dense creations—graphite for graphite’s sake.

All this to say: I am pretty sure I wouldn’t award myself any prizes. I’m not there yet. I may get there. (Am I shooting myself in the foot by saying all this?)

I am also in a season of loving words so much. The practice of writing is matching the practice of drawing, in terms of time spent.

When I graduated from college with a lit degree, all I really wanted was to drive around in a VW van, wandering from coast to coast like Jack Kerouac. Of course, Kerouac actually lived with his mother Gabrielle until he died—the facts not as glamorous as the myth. A few months after college I did end up packing my not-fancy convertible with guitars and typewriters and drove, broke and untethered, to the PNW. But I did not write a lot of poetry then. I did drugs and dyed my hair blue and learned to love a city and I lived.

But I’ve circled back to words. They waited.

Sofia Coppola posted this quote by Larry Sultan the other day (I posted a modified screen grab of her image above). I feel that it explains everything about how I’ve lived my life as an artist, for better or worse. My career has been anything but a straight line, and I think that’s a good way to live. 

Next time I give a talk to graduating art kids, I’m bringing this quote out. I’ll reveal it with a flourish, like a big a-ha. Maybe it will help them be as fractured and full as my practice has been.