Solid Ivory

I’ve had a good six weeks.

It started when the Croaker finally decided he could cut me loose. That was only a slight relief cause they left in some equipment which had to wait for a whole month to be extracted but it got done and when it was finished the Quack pronounced me “completely resolved.”

Then I’ve managed to sell two photos in the weeks since that pronouncement and if you think getting free of the medical profession and selling art work isn’t a wonderful way to feel like you are on a lucky streak, you should try it. (Not the doctor part. You should avoid doctors at all costs.)

Now selling two photos isn’t going to buy me a condo in the South of France or an apartment in Manhattan, I won’t be rubbing elbows with The Donald or Paris Hilton or any of those cats and  I won’t be ordering a new Mercedes or BMW or even buying a Nikon or Canon.

On what I make from art I qualify for food stamps and sad expressions from high school chums who have done well and are in their declining years and think anything less than a Cadillac is just a sign of lack of effort.

But you know what? Two photos in six weeks are big doings for me and I am the only opinion which counts.

There are two lessons in there for any artist.

The first and most important is that making yourself happy and proud with your accomplishments is the most important thing you can do.

You do know that winning the top prize at any juried show is more about what the jury believes than about what you have done? You do know that and when they don’t pick the picture which they should namely yours it isn’t a black mark on your skill or artistic vision, it’s a sign about how their little,. tiny minds work.

And you can’t be responsible for how anyone’s mind works except your own.

So fight the good fight, keep submitting your art and let the jury do what they are going to do cause you are completely satisfied with what you have created.

You are satisfied, aren’t you?

If you aren’t that’s where you should be working. You can find a way to be satisfied even if no one else is. That’s the wonderful thing about art; it is unique to each person who chooses to create it.

Now I don’t approve of nor condone the work of Robert Maplethorpe, and if you don’t know who that is then that’s probably just as well, but Mr. Maplethorpe has the right to both make the art and be satisfied with it. I just don’t have to be anything at all with it and that is good.

Sure, that is an extreme example and to tell the truth I don’t much care for big eyed children either but again I don’t have to. The artist who creates those forms has to be and if they aren’t they shouldn’t be doing it and then I wouldn’t have to not like it but that is their right not to cater to my likes and dislikes.

You have to create art which satisfies just one person, you.

But you do have to get out and show it.

Art in a dark closet is just so much dust catching paraphernalia. Show it and let the jury do with it what they will and then go and do some more.

Now the next thing you can learn from this experience is that showing is critical to your well being. Not that you’ll win prizes or add lines to your resume or sell or get clippings, showing let’s the public see what you are doing and tell you how much they like or dislike it and allows you a chance to reevaluate what you are doing so that if you really want to be doing something that the public likes instead of what you are doing and liking then you can change but if you never show then you will just keep doing those pictures of dryer lint and that will be all you ever do and that will be enough and if you are satisfied then that is a good and proper thing and you should be satisfied.

But if it isn’t satisfying then you could learn a thing or two and change.

Now as it turns out both of my sales were things that I did because someone else said I should.

The first one was a landscape and I don’t really do landscapes and I’m not at all enthused about the wonders of Nature or the grandeur of the wilderness and so I just seldom look outside unless I see a pretty girl walking by and I can do it without the Long Sufferin catching me cause if she does there will be hell to pay and there is going to be something I will catch hell for anyway so why give her and opportunity to give me hell just because I like pretty girls. (Girls here means any woman under the age of 100 cause I do not discriminate on the grounds of age and will unashamedly ogle any woman willing to walk by and come into ogling range.)

So I don’t do landscapes unless some one I admire and respect as an artist says you should frame that one cause it is wonderful and people would like it or words to that effect and that is what happened and lo and behold she was right and I was wrong, like that never happens and the result was the first sale. So I learned something, something which was hard for me to understand, people like landscapes.

The second sale was almost as humiliating. I did the photo cause a pal wanted art for a thingy she was doing and needed a certain sort of thing to fit in with the theme of the thing and so I did the thing which was a photo of a thing which I never shoot and it did fit in with the thing and that was good cause it was what the thingy required and if it hadn’t I wouldn’t have gotten in the thing.

And you know what it sold too?

And now I have to wonder if I have been missing out on a whole bunch of sales maybe even enough to buy that luxury condo in Powers or maybe a 1978 BMW or an old Pentax and if I just wasn’t s narrow with my vision I could have all that the flesh pots of Coos Bay could offer?

Not likely even if there were flesh pots. But I did learn and you can’t believe how hard it is to cram anything in through sixty-six years of solid ivory. (Pre-ban and non-poached)