Horrendous month! The 4 day project installing a computer system was hit by snow. The first evening it took 2 hours to drive 5 miles home, then kids off school, then van stuck in snow … the whole thing dragged on for 2 weeks, meanwhile I had a backlog of urgent work piling up from other customers. Aaaaagggggghhhhhhh! Clearing the backlog now, desperate for some time off.
I promised my daughter I’d do a drawing of her – she thought it was self-centred to keep drawing myself, maybe she’s right. Finished a job a few hours early, so turned up to after school club with the promise of being drawn. It took the additional promise of quantities of ice cream, but was worth it just to sit down quietly for a couple of hours with some colours and daughter.
Spent remaining spare time in January putting together Axis application (yet again). No prizes for guessing the outcome. Revisited the website and read a bit I’d previously missed:
“ … features over 2500 profiles …”. That’s less than 3% of professional artists. OK, now I understand. What started out as a radical open initiative to connect isolated artists with each other and with commercial opportunities, has become a closed elitist clique promoting the interests of a self-selected, self-defined mutually beneficial society, with the added bonus of tax-payer funding.
I know, it’s just ‘sour grapes’. I have a snowball’s chance in hell of entering the “best” 3% of artists, whichever measure you use, unless you count dogged and unreasonable perseverance at a lost cause. Or Lack Of Any Discernable Talent. I’ll start my own organisation: LOADiT, the online organisation bearing the burden of promoting artists with no discernable talent.
Truth is, whatever the status of my ‘inborn talent’, 1 day a week is not enough to develop it. Not even enough time to meet the AXIS criterion of “Critical awareness of how your own practice relates to wider developments in the contemporary visual arts”, which means getting out regularly in the evenings to see what other artists are doing. Fat chance of that. Most evenings I don’t even get to watch telly.
Totally missed the “School of Saatchi” series – Monday evenings 9.00 I’m reading bed time stories, making sandwiches for Tuesday and loading the dishwasher. Sad, I think I got more out of bed time stories, sandwiches and dishwasher than would have got out of Saatchi …
1 day a week is limping along at half the speed of artists who spend 2 days a week in their studios. 1 year of their work – 2 years of mine. Let alone the lucky ones who get 4 or 5 days a week. From now to retirement (20 years) I will get 4 years of full time creative work done. It would take towering genius to convert my current output to the “best 3%” in 4 years.
Advice to younger artists – get the funding sorted as a matter of priority.
This realisation is helpful. Stop trying to promote myself to promotional agencies. Get on with the work.
Oh yes, I got membership of the UK Pyrotechnical Society, and have a long shopping list of explosive ingredients.
