“No one made me do this. I love being an artist and wouldn’t do anything else. But it’s strenuous. We artists don’t just shake things out of our sleeves. It demands mental concentration, and at the end of a hard day of painting, you are drained. The positive thing about being an artist is that every once in a while you make a breakthrough, and you really see the possibility of new horizons in your work.” - Woody Gwyn
Today I need reminding of this. I started a piece that was a risk, and I don’t like it. Which means I don’t like my studio, or my career, or my ideas, or my life at the moment. It happens. Woody is right, BTW - a hard day of painting (whether good or bad) is tiring. The muse never lets go, though.
Tags: artist angst
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March 21st, 2008 at 5:33 am
It is such a bittersweet thing to be an artist. I don’t think we choose it. We have to do it. It is our nature. We need it like air or food. It is hard and exhausting. It is also lonely but the rare times when it works the ‘I’ disappears in the process. Then I am not lonely because I’m not there.
March 21st, 2008 at 6:53 am
Suzanne, you’ve summed it up eloquently - art chooses us. And at the best of times, my ego disappears and there’s just the next stroke of paint to be put on the canvas.
Now and then someone (eg, a magazine interviewer) will ask “Why do you do art?”.
My answer is always “For the same reason I breathe. Because I have to.”