On being an artist in the current world
Why art and creating art matters even more now
I‘m a professional artist. Every art I make, more than 80% of it is meh, shit, bad, unskilled, hesitant, boring. It takes so much to get to the real wonderful 10-15% that stays with me, with others, that is perhaps visibly good art (though who decides what is good art is a whole other conversation).
I have been painting full time (not every day) for 5ish years now. Every bad art I’ve made has changed me. I’m now skilled enough (though in many ways still discovering, still becoming who I am as an artist) that even with a new medium, my skills to get to a point where I’m not fighting the supplies don’t take as long to develop. I’m at a point where how the brush feels in my hand tells me the consistency of the paint on it and all this information is processed in micro moments.
I have fought with my art, broken down, switched styles, had existential crises, experienced such freedom and aliveness on paper, given up, deflated, taken a hiatus from art, come back up again and again and again, countless times over these 5 years. And I have etched into the memory of my skin, my fingers, all these experiences, these battles, these decisions, until they have translated to these skills.
This process IS the point.
That wonderful, goldmine of the 10-15% good art I’ve made? That’s the reward, the gold pot at the end of the rainbow if you keep going. You don’t go straight for the gold and miss the rainbow. The gold means nothing without the rainbow and the rainbow cannot be without the preceding thunderstorm that threatens to break everything down.
To make art authentically, truly, is to do deep inner work, to pay attention, to become aware of being a part of the fabric of existence. The painting part is just one part of it, the results, the finished painting, even the part where it meets an audience, is one small part of that one part. The work, the sweat, the joy, the mess, the feeling where making your art humbles you because you feel like you’re just the brush, like you’re the medium and some mysterious force that we call creativity moves through you to express itself on canvas. You are but the conduit, the channel for that expression to come alive, to find form.
There’s a sanctity, an indescribable sacredness and divineness in this process and in the devotion to this craft, that we take away when the result becomes the only thing that matters.
Yes, there is a lot of gatekeeping and elitism in art, yes there is a reason people are blindly adopting AI art and such trends don’t exist in a vacuum but that has nothing to do with whether AI art is art because art is not art only based on the results, the finished piece. The finished art, any art, is a product that goes out into the world and does its thing. Without the process that created it, it is like a suit of skin walking around pretending to be human. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
I am not an artist because I created 100 paintings. I am an artist because I participated in the creative process 100 times. And yes, there is so much pain and grief in being cut off from that side of you as you grew up. Very few of us have the luxury to have been able to keep that side alive, many have done that by keeping their souls corrupted even when doing creative work and many have also endured hell to keep that side of themselves awake and aware and present and alive. There’s so much nuance to a lot of these conversations, so much pain and fatigue and grief that gets bypassed because we are only focused on the outcomes.
“During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.” - Dan Savage
I keep coming back to this quote by Dan Savage these days, and I connected it with how Monet kept painting his water lilies even when there were shells falling around him. To find beauty, to look at the world with wonder, to see how alive everything around us is, entire ecosystems existing in a single drop of water, to see that, to hold still enough to notice that, to see colour and shapes and hear the music when whales sing and oceans breathe, to see the joy when rains fall and peacocks dance, that is the point. To continue to make art, to capture this beauty, to find stillness, to give a name to the chaos and pain even as the world is burning around us, matters, because it reminds us of the world we’re fighting for. That means nothing if we’re burning the world to create those water lilies, it means nothing if we’re creating those water lilies to ignore and escape the pain around us. Art can be the mirror, the salvation, the imagination for what comes next, it can be so much more than what we are reducing it to.
I am tired and charged up, I am angry and exhausted, grieving the lives that are shattering, the world we are losing, and desperately hoping it will get better. And art is where I get to put all that together, art is where I get to experience that, more and more lately. The one place I feel most whole right now is on paper, when I paint - the one place that is able to ironically hold my fractured parts all at once without trying to glue them back together is on paper, when I paint. And AI cannot replace that. AI cannot hold all the grief of a broken world, all the pain of a screaming collective getting crushed under the weight of what feels unbeatable and transmute that into raw, terrible, powerful, vicious hope. And without hope everything crumbles anyway.
I am reminded of something the Hot Priest says in ‘Fleabag’ - “…it takes strength to know what’s right. And love isn’t something that weak people do. Being a romantic takes a hell of a lot of hope. I think what they mean is, when you find somebody that you love, it feels like hope.”
In the end, love feels like hope. And to me, art is the universe expressing love, on canvas.
What a beautiful writing full of pure feelings Medha! ☺️💖