Call to Artists: Stop Making Work

I have many friends who are artists, film people, actors, painters, photographers and the like, and one of the single greatest undermining actions I see among artists is the constant creation of work.

I know a cash strapped painter who makes excellent paintings - the kind of stuff rich people on boats living in Santa Fe would love to own - and he lives in a studio full of these paintings.

Now he's building tons of rockets. Rockets? Yes, large rockets. And he is filling his studio full of these rockets for an upcoming studio crawl.

So now this painter has a studio full of really excellent paintings and a bunch of painted rockets and I'm probably one of ten people who are also artists who know about it.

I fall prey to this: I make perfectly great photography work, then fail to inform anyone about it - I am using email contact to correct this - but even the mechanism in my head that triggers what I am doing which would be of interest to other people has had to be developed over years of audience ignorance.

Others I know keep making work, while struggling to stay afloat.

As Ariana Huffington said in a New Yorker article I read with some interest last year, "Always Connect." Get people interested, get people involved and communicate with them about what you are doing.

This is especially hard for artists and has been a great struggle for me, but always defaulting to the more comfortable environs of producing more work is energy that is 'put out there,' energy expended and I find more often than not it's before the last project has been loved, owned, promoted and claimed as significant work by the artist who made it.

And that lack of love for your work, your time, for what you do rubs off on potential clients and lovers.

I am as guilty as any other of making more work before anyone understands, sees or can relate to my last piece which has many facets of sparkling which must be illuminated to those uninitiated to the processes in my mind - but I have made the decision to rectify this: to find a way to communicate with my audience, engage my audience and respect that I NEED an audience, not just my great ideas.

Cause I got a drawer full of index cards that will never translate into anything but a drawer full of index cards with ideas which may or may not be valuable to produce for a human audience.

It's people who make things happen in this world, and in the end, it is the fusion of my vision to other people's hearts and minds which makes my life as an artist possible.

So, thank you people. You represent all the potential for life to be breathed into my work - to make it alive - and to have it on your walls and in your life and remembered in your minds.

xoT