I left medical school exactly seven years ago this month, ready to commit suicide. But I decided that the one thing I wanted to do before I went gun shopping was to do as much art as possible. It’s funny, the money just came when I started doing nothing but art all day everyday. But in the last year, my output as slowed, which fucking sucks because doing art both kept me sane and paid the bills. Life changes, and I find myself in a different position than I was when I was doing art as a hobby, and then again when I began monetizing it, and now I feel as though I’ve gathered all the low-hanging fruit (art-wise), and I feel extremely challenged with this next step in my evolution as an artist. I’ve heard, “they give you 30 years to do your first show/write your first album, and then two years to do your next one.”
Since I didn’t go to art school, and since I don’t know any other real working artists, I’m kinda left to figure out on my own how to transition from having years and years of inspiration built up to having to try to coax it out of myself. I only know of a couple of things that help with getting your inspiration back: (1) Drugs, (2) collaborations with other creative types, and (3) input. Now, creative input encompasses a lot of different things for me, sometimes it’s as simple as watching an art history documentary on YouTube, or getting a new artist’s monograph and looking at the pictures in it for a few days, or a trip to the museum or a gallery showing good work, etc. But what do you do when you’ve exhausted all these options, where do you go when you’ve done everything? ‘And Alexander wept, because he had no more worlds to conquer.’
You’ll notice that all the inspiration-inducing activities listed above require external stimulation, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe every artist reaches this point where they have to turn inwards for inspiration rather than look for it outside of themselves. But, how does one do this?
I don’t know the answer, and frankly it’s a real pisser that I now have to actively do something that I was perfectly happy letting my environment do for me for the last seven years. But, it’s either that or go going gun shopping so I guess I’ll give it a shot…
The first thing I’m going to do as I attempt to blindly embark on this new phase is consolidate all the information about being an artist I have garnered up until this point, which turns out to be a whopping TWO things:
1) Diversify the kinds of art that you do (painting, sculpture, craft, basketmaking, etc. This is important because every time you learn a new media it helps enforce your particular artistic vision and it tinctures down what questions you as an person are actually dealing with.
2) You need to begin to create a language of symbols for yourself that mean something to you, the evolution of which should be visible when you look at your early work and compare it to your later work. For some people this isn’t a set of visual cues but rather a technique or an overall ‘look’ in your artwork. Van Gogh just painted anything right in front of him, but you can pick out a Van Gogh a mile away by the brushstrokes and the colors and immediacy of the work. For me, on the other hand, I like a set of reoccurring semiotics that I can arrange ad re-arrange to get what’s in my head out into external reality. Examples in my work include the Tibetan Buddhist cloud you can see in my paintings, in my rugs, on my ceramics, etc. For me these clouds have always represented how as artists we take something amorphous and abstract (reality) and formalize it into a representation (art). Houses are also a big one for me, Carl Jung says that in our dreams houses represent out psyche, the sum total of all the thoughts in our conscious brain, all the thoughts of our autonomic system, and all of our enteric neurons and stuff. And as someone who is of the belief that we are all trapped in ourselves and our emotional and sensory perceptions I like wrestling with all that stuff by painting and drawing and sewing houses.
But, in the next weeks I’ll try to think about all this stuff and hopefully have more satisfactory answers. Also, I feel it’s my duty to update my artist’s statement. Here’s two paragraphs from the one I’m working on now, hopefully as I think more about all these questions it’ll crystallize. I titled it ‘The Doomed Journey,’ Lol:
What can the artist hope to accomplish in their lifetime when death is a certainty and all matter is destined to succumb to the entropy of total decay?
As I become a middle-aged artist the difficulties of the last few years have rendered me unsatisfied with perfecting my technique and visually interesting amalgams of color, shape, and texture. I now feel myself turning away from paltry beauty and being compelled to use art to record my search for meaning. But what exactly is meaning? Here I will define meaning as a forever-unattainable search for answers. For certainly no answers exist, yet I feel myself being called to start down this path – a paradox verging on the spiritual.
Throughout my artistic career, I have been committed to creating a highly-personal visual vocabulary, but this new direction requires more complex representations of higher-order non-material concepts. More than representing objects of interest I encounter in my daily life as I have happily done, I now aim to create a set of discrete but interlocking visual cues or semi-abstract glyphs that, like the words of these sentences, can be arranged and rearranged to document this doomed search for meaning.
For reference, here is my old (way more optimistic) artist statement that I wrote up when I was just starting out:
The communally-curated criteria for what makes art ‘good’ has evolved through time in tandem with shifting trends in the history of art. For example, impressionism evolved as the result, in part, of advances in optical technology; which changed the emphasis in painting from technical perfection to emphasizing evidence of the human hand. In this way, technology and art are inherently related, and both occupy the similar spaces in our shared cultural consciousness. Within both art and technology, innovation finds richness and context in what has come before.
Today, we do not know what the next great movement in art will be. Surely ‘pop surrealism,’ the synthesis of technical expertise with our budding shared visual vocabulary (provided by mass media and pop-culture) will take its place as an important movement. But besides ‘pop surrealism,’ or possibly graffiti- or street-art, what will come next?
At least in part, the next aesthetic movement must take ‘craft’ into account: craft, defined as art that (1) requires mindful, skilled work to accomplish (2) embraces utility and functionality and (3) which embodies the egalitarian soul of art. These ideas counterpoint and balance our emerging, technology-driven world. For example, with the internet and photo-manipulation, we will start to appreciate art in which the human experience strongly emerges. With the advent of new materials, we will start to re-evaluate qualities of the older ones.
Just one medium cannot reflect this vision. Therefore I utilize a variety of mediums, both fine-art and crafts, to create a network of different objects which share the same imagery. This network of projects interacts and contextualizes itself. My personal visual vocabulary is firmly rooted in the city of Hamtramck; because, for me, Hamtramck is a wellspring of creativity, love, weirdness and all things good. Finally, in my work I hope to evoke in the viewer an appreciation of the synthesis of traditional craft techniques, modern fine-art aesthetic, and community: Just as our current cultural and technological climate reflects both our understanding of the past and our hopes for the future.
Ok. Thanks for reading. I’ll try to write another blog post in a month (Fucking Google Analytics), but knowing myself I give that maybe a 5 to 1 odds. If anyone is reading this, and thinks that have any information for me or other ideas or even opinions then email me at emilyjanewood.ew@gmail.com - I work out of my house, I’m alone all day every day, and I love talking art and artists.
