While I am out on my lunchtime walks with the dog, my eyes adjusting to the open countryside and brightness, after having looked at things indoors and right under my nose for too long, it occurs to me that nature does not care about convenience. Passing some houses, I see weeds grow right in the meticulously landscaped flowerbeds. Where someone laid down a gravelly path to their front door, bushels of grass peek through where there are meant to be none. In another garden, muddy soil and rushes cover an area otherwise earmarked for a garden feature of sorts, the building attempts temporarily abandoned to figure out a solution, clearly because it’s just too tricky to keep fighting nature in that spot.
In my mind, I am drawing a parallel between what ought to be and what is, and I wonder… Isn’t it always the way that creation is just pure abandonment? Nature going all out, regardless of what anyone thinks or would prefer. Colours! Textures! Shapes! Space! Sounds! Regardless of what seems more convenient to anyone. Immediately, I wish that I could be more like that. I still care too much, think too much, worry too much, about what I should create instead of just doing whatever comes out on any given day. The will, indeed the urgent need to create is strong, yet often I fail myself by resisting, by putting other stuff first, by doubting myself. Will anyone like this? Is it useful? Is it sellable? Questions that really should not matter but, somehow, alas, they still do.
Art is the one thing that nobody asked you to do, a quote I came across quite some time ago but that haunts me in a funny way, almost daily. After all, I have education and qualifications, varied work experience, covetable soft skills… why do I make my life that much harder, that bit more inconvenient by doing what I do, instead of working a 9 to 5 job that pays well and offers security, status, respect? There is no one answer. In truth, there is no real answer at all. I don’t know what came over me when I decided to just leave all of that to instead do what I felt like doing is right for me. It seemed impulsive and random to society, while for me it was the most natural thing in the world. Normal, like grass in a garden. After all, what is the definition of work? Something you can and ideally want to do, for acceptably adequate remuneration. Simple. So really, as far as my logic is concerned, there is no real difference between then and now.
Of course, society begs to differ. What? Why? How? Get a real job. Don’t throw away your education. Can you live off that? Endless noise in my ears that everyone, including complete strangers, feel entitled to make around me and what I do for a living or, as far as they see it, do not do, namely really work. People suck at dealing with what they don’t understand. If it’s not aligned with how they choose to live their own lives, it’s strange, suspicious, ridiculous, wrong even. Nobody walks off the street into a solicitor’s office and asks them about their life choices or salary. Yet it seems totally acceptable to people to ask an artist how much they earn or if they can make a living off what they do. Apart from being terribly rude, this is also infuriatingly stupid. It used to bother me, now I just shake it off. For the most part…
Sometimes I wonder myself why am I such an inconvenient person? Why do I feel compelled to say what I think? Why am I the one who tends to put into words what nobody else dares to say out loud? Why do I not care about status, am not impressed by money, fame, connections, or position? Why don’t I want to work in a more predictable or stable career? Why don’t I live in my country of origin? Why am I here, living in rural Ireland? Why do I bother making art? I have no straightforward or convenient answers, except that I am apparently quite an inconvenient person by default. However, I have a few more questions of my own, in return:
Why does it matter so much what I do to people who don’t even know me? Why do people think that my life and personhood is a public domain, to which they are entitled to? Why is it so offensive to some people that I chose a different path to theirs? What does it matter if I work in a city office or in my studio, in the middle of nowhere? Isn’t work just work? Where you spend your days and/or nights doing what needs to get done (because make no mistake, art also needs to get done), eventually getting paid for it? Why should I feel lesser for doing creative work? What an artist does is not as clearly defined as what, say, an orthodontist does. Nobody walks into an orthodontist’s clinic to yell what are you doing with your life!? at them. Because it seems obvious, understandable.
Is it though? Is it ever that obvious what anyone does or why? Some are in it for the money, others to help. Many don’t have a professional choice at all. Personally, I’m simply grateful that there are all kinds of different occupations out there, to suit different people, to offer different services or products. I’m glad I have a job that suits me. At the end of the day, being an artist is just that, work. Nothing more but nothing less either. Maybe it’s a calling, a vocation, for some. The same could be said about other jobs, too, though. I would argue that everyone has it in them to be artistic on some level, in some form or other. Creativity is not exclusive, on the contrary. Society may try to gatekeep, but in its essence you can’t shut art out. It’s everywhere, all around us, all the time. Who’s to judge?
I suspect that’s where the inconvenience lies. I can’t be put in a box easily, but judging me seems easy enough, on the other hand. Apparently, I provoke through simply and happily being myself, just quietly doing my thing. How inconvenient is that!? Yes, sometimes my art is pure abandonment of coherence, rhyme or reason. Also inconvenient, it seems. Creativity is indeed wild abandonment though, just as nature intended. A safe space to just be. With that in mind, I call my dog to turn around, as I feel the sudden urge to go back home to my studio, to see which materials tickle my fancy and where the afternoon takes me… Nothing inconvenient about that, I find.
I so relate to all this and it was a pleasant ecperience to read it this morning, thanks for sharing 🙏🏽