For the Love of Art
Hello Interweb! Like many people, as we near the end of 2017, I’ve found myself thinking about what I’ve accomplished this year and what I want the next year to hold. Creatively, I feel like I’ve grown and progressed but to some extent I can’t help wonder if I’ve allowed myself to get sidetracked on why I started to invest in my creativity in the first place.
Sharing Art Online
It's been just under 16 months since I entered the world of social media and started posting my artwork online. As a teen, the idea of doing this was terrifying and inconceivable, as well as a little “show off”-y, so I never aspired to changing that perception.
The feedback I’ve received online has only been positive, but my audience has remained primarily friends and family, interspersed with the occasional “like” from Instagrammers who may or may not be more interested in whether I’ll “like” and “follow” them back than they are in the content I’m sharing. Before I get where I’m going with this let me put out a little disclaimer: I’m not asking to be the target of trolling! That said, I’ve actually felt a little disappointed at the overall lack on ripples my art has caused, it’s just another drop in the bucket of countless millions of images posted every day, engendering very little interaction or consideration. So I’ve been asking myself, why does that bother me? Why did I start making art again in the first place? And why will I continue to do it no matter what?
For Art’s Sake
Without going into my history in unnecessary detail, I’ve always been naturally inclined towards art and working with my hands. When I left school, however, I intentionally pushed my creative pursuits aside because I didn’t see the profit in them, in other words, art couldn’t earn me a living so it was a waste of time to do it.
This mentality didn’t hurt me at first, at least not in an obvious way. For several years I functioned well enough with more functional creative pursuits like cooking, baking, sewing etc. Then, a couple of years ago when I experienced some stress-related mental health issues, only pencils, brushes and paint could give me the much needed respite from the turbulence going on inside my head. I started making art for art’s sake, and nothing else.
Reading books like Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert were fundamental in my change of mentality. Realising that we are all creative beings, and we all benefit from exploring our creativity, motivated me to keep making art just because I love it. There was a part in that book that effectively said that demanding your art to earn you a living is going to kill it off rather than nurture it, so don’t put that kind of pressure on it. I took that advice to heart, and as a result painting and drawing filled a part of me that I’d tried to ignore for the best part of four or five years.
In addition to that book, I watched videos on YouTube of working artists who encourage a similar approach - don’t worry about how much better other people are, or whether others will like the work, or figuring our your style, just do the work and you will unquestionably improve! Without my being fully aware of it, watching this content not only reawakened my enthusiasm for art, it also watered a dormant seed, namely my lifelong dream of being a career artist, a dream I’d trained myself to dismiss on account of the odds being entirely not in my favour.
Swings and Roundabouts
Over the last year I’ve vacillated between doing art as a hobby and trying to make it into something that I can sell. My Instagram profile has switched to a business account and back again on a couple of occasions, and I’ve opened and closed online shops featuring my artwork more times than I can count.
Meanwhile, over this past year, for the first time in my life I’ve had a creative job! My husband and I run a small photography business which is paying our bills and keeping a roof over our heads. For the most part, we don’t worry about money, and I love our job. I truly, honestly love it. So that makes me wonder why. Why do I keep trying to make money out of my art? And here’s what I’ve come up with.
I’ve not fully accepted that it’s totally and completely okay to make art for art’s sake. It’s healthy. And personally, it’s intrinsic to who I am. So I need to stop trying to make it “okay” to spend time doing it because it has practical or monetary value. Would I like it if people wanted to buy my work? To love it so much that they want to have it in their home? Of course! But sharing my work online was initially not about that. It was about motivating others to be creative just like I’ve been motivated by looking at artists who share their work online. It was about becoming more confident in my skills and meanwhile not taking my art too seriously, being willing to put it out there and not worry about what people think.
And that’s what I want to go back to this year. Experimenting. Having fun. Expressing myself and releasing things that I can’t vocalise or even turn into a coherent thoughts. Sharing my art to motivate others to try it too. Creating art for art’s sake, for the love of art.