The Wednesday Resolution

November 26, 2009 by Leif

Things happen more out of necessity than most would care to admit. And in that sense no one likes feeling like a cork on the stream save, maybe, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. So it was a surprise that on last Wednesday I was hit with the fact that there is no use in fighting against the wind.

The biggest issues with the life of an independent artist is one of money. I refuse gallery representation and I believe that an artist should work for a living either through a day job or as an artist craftsman. Shunning the latter, I have a day job to pay my bills and must commit to my work whenever I have the free time. Is this an issue? No. But what is? Money of course! The artist in question has taken some bizarre vow of poverty in which all proceeds go towards meager living and helping the family--leaving little left for art and art supplies.

So necessity is now the Mother I must contend with.

In the last century found art was all the rage. The artists would dumpster dive, come up with a theory, and move on with their lives (preferably with money in their pockets). Found art no longer holds water. One can no longer point to a snow shovel, give it a rhetorical name, and hope for the best. This is the nature of the beast. Fortunately, however, is the fact that we live in an age that is no longer connected with the grim meat hook of reality. We have internets and facebooks (does adding the plural ruin my SEO?).

We can make a piece of work that exists solely on the atomic plane. Reserved via magnetic memory or dots and dashes burned in a disc. What fortune! But we must have the tools to work and how does one get those tools?! That is for another day since this is about resolutions.

Life then becomes a process of finding out the best way to float down the stream.

When one resource leaves the cork must frantically bat about in the water until it can grasp a nearby twig, some grass, whatever it can use at that moment to help itself. This, then, is the process. One must never be so attached to a process or medium that they cannot leave it in a hurry. The goons are closing in and the jig is up--we must run and work with what we got!

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