Archive for February, 2009
Is your success as an artist still possible ?
Let’s get real. What are your chances of successfully making art at this stage in your life ?
If you were a rare prodigy like Picasso, chances are you wouldn’t be reading this. You’d be too busy producing masterpieces to be subscribed to Fresh Horses or exploring different ways of opening to creative expression.
Prodigies don’t often indulge in open-ended exploration. They tend to start with a clear idea or concept of where they want to go. Then they go there. Searching means nothing to the prodigy. Instead, they find.
One indication of a prodigy’s success — Picasso’s earliest works are worth about four times his works done later in life.
Sometimes genius is anything but rarefied.
“Sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty-two years of working at your kitchen table,” wrote Gladwell in his October ’08 New Yorker article.
We who were not prodigies may yet be late bloomers.
The personality of late bloomers is oriented to experimentation. It requires time to assimilate growth and healing in your life in order to achieve the desired goals — those that meet your exacting standards.
Late bloomers are usually on a journey through life.
They collect and grow from experiences. One thing leads to a richer something else, and so their work evolves, forever imperfect, gathering in richness through research and experience. They are always on the cusp of transformation.
If you are a late blooming artist, you are more like a Cezanne. The works at the end of his career are his finest masterpieces, worth about fifteen times the value of his earlier works.
How shall we measure success ?
In my experience, success will probably be measured by personal satisfaction more than anything. Though we understand the value of money, late bloomers tend to value their journey of personal creation and growth above the destination.
Assuming you’re a late bloomer like me, you may want to reinvent yourself at some stage in your life, or explore another side of your spirit. The longer you live, the greater your possibility of success.
Don’t go it alone.
No matter how much of a self-starter, pull-yourself-up-by-the-boot-straps kind of guy you think you are, there will come a time or three when you run out of juice and courage. What you need is the connection of someone on your side; an advocate you trust.
Seems impossible to be a success at much of anything without at least one advocate who really cares for you. A true advocate has no ulterior motive other than their genuine caring for you and your creative explorations.
By the time you know you’re getting somewhere in personal artistic expression, you’ll also feel grateful to others knowing you couldn’t have done it alone. This is one indication that you are learning the giving and receiving of true love.
Significant others.
No one in any significant profession can do it without the essential help of others. Even hard-working ten-thousand-hour obsessive-compulsive introverts have to learn to accept support and encouragement from trusted others.
For some, this comes naturally, even easily. For others, particularly those in self-starting fields, it’s a long and dusty road pocked with trial and error.
The writer David Fountain’s wife happily supported the eighteen year gestation of her husband’s work “Brief Encounters”. She had complete confidence in him.
Cezanne’s father didn’t hesitate to support his son financially, being just as committed to artistic ‘perfection’ as his son.
Theo Van Gogh’s devotion to his brother was not just financial; he was the emotional bedrock of Vincent’s life.
Late bloomer’s stories are invariably love stories in the making.