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Sanity is over-rated
It’s 1985 and 2 friends and I were sitting around a table drinking bourbon contemplating our graduation from art school.
It just so happens that we were all painters with common goals and uncommon styles of painting, but that’s another story.
As the conversation matured and drunk-ed-ness escalated the creative mill began to churn.
What was it really that we expected from our Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees? What were we going to do with the pending reality of the real world?
Dismayed but encouraged at the same time we thought we would be embarking on this journey together.
As ideas began to fly so did our inspiration for a great future.
Little did we know that time would fade our enthusiasm and our present cooperative would move in different directions.
What was it that we were expecting to create that evening? Was it an indelible connection with our purpose in life, or were we deluded by our support for each other?
All those amazing projects like the “20 foot chair”, “Men in paper suits” and of course “Special K Cows” were things created in a sandbox never to be reproduced.
It took years to put those experiences into the proper perspective. Once I did, those happenings became exceptional guides to understanding my creative process.
Art School! Wow! What a concept! I wouldn’t have exchanged it for anything and yet one sentence rings out in my psyche,
“Don’t even consider your self an artist until you’ve done 1000 drawings,”
I’ve since moved on past that series of words which was a dare more than anything. I think I was being challenged to pursue a career as an artist and 25 years later here I sit writing about it.
Moving past Art School and that system of rules and procedures was one of the hardest things I ever did. I still find my self going back to the fundamentals of drawing and design keeping in mind those thought altering concepts that could have easily destroyed my dreams.
Maintaining my integrity was never a conscious decision because it’s context was always embedded in my creativity and my need to create exceptional art.
I have taken some time to un-learn those conventions that have misguided me for many years and kept me from being a happy successful artist.
The art world can be cruel only if you put your credibility in some one else’s hands.
Here are some beliefs that have plagued artists for centuries.
I know many Artists today who are doing very well and as far as the fame thing goes the Internet is the world stage.
I ran into a young woman I knew in university and asked her how she was doing. Her answer amazed me when she told me her parents had always lived in poverty, her brothers and sisters were in poverty. She was very proud of the fact that she broke the cycle and is now doing well. She said she learned to measure her successes rather than focusing on her failures.
She is the curator of her own gallery and sells her art all over the world.
Crazy people don’t know their crazy.
Ahhh! to be a child again!
Life is qualitative not quantitative.
“All I want to do is paint and the trappings of life get in the way”.
D Grudniski
“Sanity is over-rated”
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