MYTH #9: CERTAIN CONDITIONS MUST BE IN PLACE TO CREATE ART
“An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo.”
—SETH GODIN, AUTHOR OF PURPLE COW
Bill Murray, taking a cab in the Bay Area, struck up a conversation with his driver.
“So,” he asked. “What do you do when you’re not driving bozos like me around?”
“I’m a sax player,” his driver said.
“Do you practice?” Bill asked.
“Wish I could. I drive this cab 14 hours a day.”
“So where’s the sax now?”
“In the trunk.”
“Well, pull over,” Murray instructed. “I’ll drive and you can practice.”
As Murray explained to his audience at the rib joint where they also stopped on their monumental trip to Sausalito, “His sax playing made for a beautiful night.”
It also punches a hole in the myth that certain conditions have to be in place for art to happen. This week, we’re going to shred the last of the old templates. Don’t even try to pull any of these excuses.
“I don’t live in New York or Hollywood.” Jeff Daniels lives in Chelsea, Michigan, a town of about 5,000. Jeff Bridges lives on a ranch in Montana. Sean Penn, after the 2010 earthquake, lived in a tent in Haiti.
When Crystal Bridges mounted their huge State of the Art exhibition, they found artists creating everywhere, from goat barns in the rural South to old pie factories in New England.
And need I remind you that Nelson Mandela wrote his memoir on hidden scraps of paper while in prison on Robben Island.
Where you are? Matters not one whit.
“I don’t have the proper tools or the right equipment.” Artist Jimmy Lee Sudduth started his prodigious career drawing with his fingers in the dirt outside his parents’ front porch. Working in Fayette, Alabama, he found all his own “canvases”—plywood, doors, boards from demolished buildings—and made all his own “paint” using mud and pigments from such things as berries, motor oil, and plant juices.
Or consider fellow Alabama artist Thornton Dial, who incorporates everything from mangled Mickey Mouse dolls and mattress coils to strips of discarded American flags in his installations. Both these artists have been featured at the Smithsonian and MoMA. Neither had proper tools.
“Take stock in what you already have,” says filmmaker Robert Rodriguez. “If your father owns a liquor store, make a movie about a liquor store. You’ve got a dog? Make a movie about your dog.”
Art can be created from anything.
“I haven’t mastered the right techniques to make a film, write a book, sell a song.” Repeat after me: there’s no one way to create art.
Again, to quote gonzo filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, “You don’t need a fancy camera. You don’t need a bunch of gear. You don’t need a screenplay. You don’t need great actors, a beautiful location, editing, or even money. The only thing you need is something to record a bunch of successive images on and a way to exhibit it.”
“My stuff doesn’t look like his/hers.” Congratulations! You just created something original. You’ve got to learn to stand by your own work even if it’s terrible. Especially when it’s terrible.
“I can’t get an art gallery or a literary agent to represent me.” So what? Thanks to sites like Etsy, Zazzle, Yokaboo, and even Amazon Handmade, there are a gazillion ways to sell your art.
Countless artists are making a living (yet another myth—it can’t be done) by managing their own websites, handling their own sales, and developing a following independent of the old gallery model.
“I’m not naturally gifted like real artists.” That’s where practice comes in. Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, compared creating art to reading. We don’t give kids a stack of books and expect them to know how to read. We wouldn’t accuse them of not having the aptitude for reading if they didn’t pick it up on their own.
We all learned to read. We can all learn to produce art. It’s a simple matter of learning the process and mustering the confidence to give it a whirl.
What treasure do you have, not to sell or to use to overcome anything, but simply to offer? What treasure have you been holding secret until now?
