Got back to the easel. Got rejected for a big piece of work I was hoping to land. Cast once more in to uncertainty and doubt about what I am doing and what I should be doing.
I try to trick myself into finding meaning and purpose in my art, but the placebo isn't as effective if you know it is a placebo. I know that art isn't a higher cause, that it is just as arbitrary and self-serving as any other human endeavour, despite the mythology that is built up around it. It is easy, weak and wrong to think that a great painting is somehow worth spending a lifetime trying to produce, even at the expense of wellbeing, sanity, health. Given everything that I think I believe, I know that it would be wrong to sacrifice serenity of mind to the false idol of creative achievement, but look, I disregard this knowledge and blunder along anyway. I need to confess to myself why.
Drawing was something that I received positive feedback for as a child. I was made to feel like I was good at it, and so I placed value on producing artworks, and spent a lot of time doodling and drawing. Producing art was a way of receiving praise and attention. It still is.
I should be relentlessly pursuing things that I know to make me happy, that give my life purpose and meaning. Instead I am ensconcing myself in something I don't truly believe in, indulging a vestigial, almost subconscious proclivity towards artistic endeavour that I cling to and self-define through despite seeing it for what it is and always has been: a plea for attention, a selfish, passive demand on others to recognise some kind of worth in me and in what I do. I want to be driven by a blind passion, a certainty that I am exercising a divine talent and treading a rarefied path towards knowledge and beauty, but I know that these are truly penultimate causes that obscure and mask the true motive force: the desire and desperate need for approval.
When I look at a masterwork in a gallery, I do so in a keen-eyed emulous search for techniques and styles and information to steal and incorporate into my own work to better and to beat what has gone before. The feelings of awe and respect and admiration are bound to a self-congratulatory awareness that I am feeling the appropriate feelings and can express them later to others -- to show my discernment, discretion, taste. A feedback loop is created; it is not about the work of art, it is about what it gives me to show off to others.
I know that making art is exceptionally unlikely to lead to financial stability. I know that even if I do get praise, it will most likely be from people whose opinions I don't value. The sad reality is that drawing and painting realistically is a craft that can be learned -- practice makes permanent, perfect practice makes perfect -- and I have lost a decade of potential skill through not bothering to pursue it. There is nothing mystical or intrinsically good about art, least of all the kind of art I have been producing. It is just a desperate attempt to differentiate myself from people I know, which conversely actually reveals how like so many others I am -- 'realist artists' are everywhere when you look for them, as it is an artform that is relatively easily taught and mastered. And yet, worst of all, it is not even in demand from the market, because it has all been done before, says nothing new and means nothing beyond 'look at me and what I can do'. Neither does making art make me particularly happy, compared to other equally self-indulgent pursuits. I'm driven by the wrong forces: thirst for adulation, fear of being mediocre and a misplaced desire to be true to what I wanted as a young person.
And so I find myself racked by impulses I neither honour nor wholly abandon, unable to commit to painting because I don't believe in the art myth and yet unable to turn my back on it because I fear the idea of feeling regret and guilt for not pursuing a potential talent. I pursue consciously a course of action that I know to be no good -- not giving me peace of mind or happiness -- and I insist on pursuing it even knowing that it is self-delusion that drives me on to self-destruction.
