Real Art

I've always had a tendency to consider "real artists" as those people lucky enough to spend all their time conceiving and making art...the folks who appear to have life support for all the other tasks of living so they can focus on manifesting their artistic vision.

I read Fiberarts Magazine regularly and I'm so inspired by fiber and textile artists who seem to have a direction with their art. Because oftentimes I don't feel as though I have a direction. Part of it, I guess, is that the real making of art in my life feels sandwiched in between marketing and promoting, paperwork, doing other things as necessary to earn a living, going to the post office, etc. etc. So I frequently feel like I'm skimming the surface rather than sinking in deep to whatever catches my imagination, and then pushing the edges with it.

Perhaps this is a common lament among artists, I don't know. Perhaps if one goes to school to study art making and has unlimited time to devote to their art, this isn't an issue. Sometimes I think it has to do with commitment. Maybe it is a problem related to being talented at many things, so that it is inherently difficult to choose one area to push forward with, to some level of completion. But the older I get, the more I see it as a reality of modern living that relatively few of us have the luxury of doing nothing but our art. I just don't know.

What I DO know is that periodically I feel frustrated, like I'm not doing enough with my art, like I'm focusing more on output than on the processes of exploration and discovery, as though the latter is inherently more important than the former. My sense of what constitutes real art and real artists, I'm seeing, is related to those very processes that I feel I spend too little time at. And this is what frustrates me.

Digitized Peacock Eye

I'm thinking in this very moment that I'm likely too hard on myself and this post probably belongs on my personal blog! Blah, blah, blah!