The Difficulties of Being an Artist (or Trying to be an Artist)

Right now it's 11:15 on a Wednesday night. I'm tired, but I don't want to go to sleep because I have to work tomorrow. I can't avoid it, but I try to by making my days longer. That makes no sense. I never claimed that it did.

The problem is that my job is not fulfilling. Don't get me wrong. I like my coworkers, I like that I have a job, I like that it isn't completely abysmal; I just don't want to work there anymore. My creativity is stifled. It's snuffed. My life feels like non stop rice cakes. Plain and uninteresting and tasteless and monotonous and a struggle to get through. In fact, the next person that asks me how I'm doing will get the response, "Rice Cakes". I think I've invented a new turn of phrase. Let's get it to catch.

My only desire and wish and hope is to get my art career going, or at least to get a job that is creatively fulfilling and not all about other people's money. I want to touch souls through art. I want people to jump into my paintings like they're in Mary Poppins. I want to create, inspire, and creatively inspire. And perspire. Creatively.

I have hurdles, though. Money being one. But money isn't everything. And it certainly is no excuse. Just look at Jean Michel Basquiat. Another obstacle is my imagination. Or maybe it's my self-editor. I feel like my imagination is great, but my self-editor takes dumps all over my ideas. This last week I felt super excited to start a whole series of paintings based on new beginnings and old remnants. I was jazzed. I wrote out an entire list of plans for where I was going with my series. I even started on a couple of sketches. I even painted a picture. But then I looked at Bo Bartlett's paintings. I realized I was painting things that I thought would sell, not things I wanted to paint. But then I asked myself, "What do you want to paint?" And I had no answer. So I began to look through more Bo Bartlett works. And I became discouraged, because he knows what he wants to paint. He has a style. He has a language. He owns it. He paints his passion and it is obvious. You read his interest. You read his sincerity. You read his emotion. You read his beliefs. And all through a simple painting. I don't even know where to begin. I don't even understand how anybody does that. I may even say that only 0.5 percent of artists know how to do that. You have to be an artistic genius.

And that is frustrating. I've always been at the top of my class when it came to rendering objects through drawing and painting. I've been good at finding emotion. I've been good at finding interesting compositions. I've been good at proportion, structure, shading, color choice, etc. But here I am, dreading going to work tomorrow at a job that has nothing to do with my talents. And here I am, drawing a complete blank in terms of what I love. Because I want to paint what I love. But I don't even know what I love. I guess there are things that I have loved all of my life. My family. My friends. God. Books. Movies. Video Games.

Video games are out of the question. I'm not interested in painting them. Movies, too. I've been there, done that. If someone wants a commission of Clint Eastwood, I'll do it. Otherwise, I'm done with that. Books may be interesting. Scenes, characters, authors, settings...there may be potential there. But it doesn't grab me. God is impossible to paint. I could paint scenes from the Bible, but I could never do them justice. They've already been done as well as possible. Plus, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but a thousand words of Scripture is well beyond any thousands of pictures. I suppose any work that truly is of worth can demonstrate some aspect of truth and therefore of spirituality and reality and therefore may point to God in a very real way, so it's not out of the question. My friends are a possibility. I've already had a handful that are willing to pose for me. I need to get on that. My family may be an option. They're good people.

I'm just so discouraged right now. In a funk. I look at the Bartletts and the Hoppers and the Van Goghs and the Monets and the Basquiats and the Rembrandts of the world and I don't know how I'll ever even approach them. I read the Tolstoys and the Chestertons and the Dostoevskys and the Dickenses and the McCarthys of the world and I see that they were geniuses and I get envious and impatient and discouraged. All I want is to bring the subtle and lasting joys to people that these incredible men have brought to me. And I'm clueless as to how I can do that. And I know that all day tomorrow at work I'm just going to be thinking about how great life would be if I was a full-time artist, living my passion, touching lives, embracing people. And I know that after work, when I get home, I'll have no idea where to start and I'll be impatient and restless all over again.

Thank you for reading my rant. I'm obviously discontent right now. I should probably get some sleep.