I have been selected for Portland Open Studios, which came as quite a surprise to me, but hopefully this represents a significant step for my art. Accordingly, I want to document to some extent my life in the six months between being selected and actually having the open studio weekends.
In response to this selection, I have elected to take myself more seriously as an artist. Perhaps I don’t paint like the typical Sunday painter, but that is long what I have regarded myself to be. In high school when I actually had an art school courting me, I decided that art was an impractical career choice. Why I thought that writing was more practical is an entirely different story. How I ended up going to a university that didn’t care about me or how I ran out of money before graduating from same university are also different stories. I would certainly be interested in how my life would have been different had I gone to said art school, but this is not for me to know. So now, some years on art has risen to a higher priority in my life. Moreover, for the next six months at least I will be devoting more time to painting than writing. Investing in this potential career as a painter may prove to be a foolish choice, but apparently, the way life works is that you have to take risks in order to find these things out. I can think of much safer and more convenient ways, but so far, none of those has materialized.
In regards to “taking myself seriously”. I hope to avoid being as pretentious as I have been in the past and as pretentious as my wife continues to think that I am. Yet I am writing this with the mindset that someone(s) out there will care enough to read it. A modest person would probably keep these thoughts to himself and not use them as a vague marketing tool, so you decide.
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