Questions people have when they see my art
#271, with scenes from last month's open studio, and why I stopped drawing comics.
Dear reader,
I did another open studio event a couple of weeks ago. Heavy rain was forecast for the evening, so I figured not many people would show up. The idea was to show new paintings, paint until someone arrived and, hopefully, keep painting then. And even if no one shows up, at least I will have done something, said a voice in the back of my head. I always plan with extreme pessimism. It is not healthy, but.
Well, more than 20 people showed up. At one point, there was not enough standing room inside the studio. People were literally spilling out. Someone knocked over a coffee mug at one point but that was my fault for leaving it like that, and forgetting about it, when I started painting. (This happens often.)
I made some sales too. There were a bunch of tiny drawings in a box labelled “$20”, and people eagerly snapped them up. This made me happy because it is not good to keep looking at things you have made, and it is wonderful that they will live in someone else’s world now.
This is how I think about the business of art.
Not the business, but the business. The thing of it.
Sneaky Art happens and I capture it as best as I can. The drawing is thus an artifact of my world, a marker of time, place, of being witness. It lives in my world then, on the wall, or a shelf, or in a plastic bag, or in a box labelled “$20”. When someone picks it up, it leaves my world and enters their world. In this world, it will be displayed on a new wall in a new room of a new home. It will be seen by new eyes that have never seen it before, that never saw it as it almost was, as it could have been, as it nearly became. They will see it as it is. What it is is a new story, almost unrelated to me. Thus, the art will lose its original meaning, but gain several new meanings.
So it is a joy to share art with others. To contemplate all the worlds we carry within ourselves, and how they intersect with mine. At every intersection, new meaning. I imagine all the new meanings being created.
This is the business of art, I think.
Time will pass. Weeks, months, years. The art will be looked at less often. Its origin story will be told - the one which began from my open studio - less often. Then one day it will be overlooked. It will become a part of the continuum - that wall, that desk, or dresser, or mantelpiece.
Thus, an epic story plays out every time I get to share my art. I try to enjoy each opportunity equally.
Dear reader, if this isn’t nice, what is?
The next open studio is on Friday, March 28th. For more info, sign up below:
Why did you stop drawing comics?
There is a long answer to this. Below is the short answer:
I grew up reading the syndicated comics of legendary Indian cartoonist RK Laxman, and believed from a young age (perhaps naively) in the power of humour to speak truth to power. But now I see my favourite political satirists and no longer feel the same way. They appear closer to clowns or court jesters, mollifying their bases but making no real difference to anything.
As this disillusionment set in, I also realized that the business of being funny/edgy about everything was wearing me down. My world was becoming smaller, because I had my shields up. Always building walls, always taller. To grow, I needed to lower the walls, and allow myself to hurt.
Finally, after a few years of making political comics about India, I was affected by the amount of hate and vitriol dished out by the online troll armies of India’s right-wing authoritarian government. I was not up to dealing with that volume of abuse.
Why wasn’t I getting through to them, I wondered. How else to say this? I felt the need to communicate better, to say truths no one could deny. That vague ideal has brought me to my art.
What does it mean to “fail successfully”?
“How to Fail Successfully” is the title of a book on the shelf of my studio. I think failing successfully is the only effective strategy for a creative life. It is an acknowledgment of the ebbs and flows, of the waves over which you have no control, that can move and displace and drown you and everything else. It is a framing device to see through. It is a strategy to keep building. It is a trick to forgive yourself more often.
When I think about my life in this regard, I find several successful failures. I failed as a cartoonist when it became impossible to juggle comics with the academic load of my Master’s degree (in Mechanical Engineering). A few years later, I left my PhD program to become a novelist. So I failed at academia and, because I did not finish the novel, I also failed at the thing I left it for. If I had not failed twice this way, I may have never started drawing on a whim. We would not be speaking right now.
Do you feel like you wasted your degree?
No.
I love to learn things, and I loved learning at TU Delft in the Netherlands. Knowledge is never wasted. All knowledge adds up, takes different forms, and contributes to our life in different ways.
What is the worst time to be an artist?
The idea of art is under assault, but it is not alone in this. All culture is under assault by the forces of techno-feudalism, by the algorithms made by legions of engineer-mercenaries who do not care what is done with their work as long as their stock options go up, by the greediest-richest-lamest people in human history. They have put you, and me, and everything we produce, onto an assembly line feeding into their content mills. To be ground down until there is nothing unique or human. To come out the other end as slop.
The worst time to be an artist is when art is just content, just like everything else. Like war and genocide, like protests and counter-protests, when we live in a media bubble surrounded by endless feeds, endlessly refreshing. But art is a call to understand our world, to connect with other humans from whom we are separated by space and time, by language and ethnicity. It is the worst time to be an artist when people don’t want to understand anymore.
It is the best time to be an artist.
How do this studio work for you?
I rented this studio space last summer, after my son began his slow but inexorable conquest of our home. It is my lab for experiments. It is the space where I allow myself to experiment. It needed to be outside the home anyway, so I could be the person-outside-his-home, because I think we are different people in different circumstances, and being everything in one place is not sustainable.
It is where I come to meet other creatives. My studio is surrounded by dozens of creatives - videographers, tattoo artists, jewelry makers, writers, musicians, painters, potters - who leave inspiration like butterflies floating through the air. I walk down the corridors, reach up, and try to catch them.
It is also where I meet clients, and show original work.
It is where I wrote my book. It is where I recorded my course.
How do you talk and draw at the same time?
People mistakenly assume that to talk and draw at the same time you have to very good at drawing. This is incorrect. I am just that good at talking.
Everyone who came to the open studio got a tiny drawing to take home. Let’s do that again. Will I see you at the next?
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Thanks for the encouragement today!
Wonderful post! Thank you for sharing! I appreciate your response to the “comics” question. I too was impressed by edgy, clever humor when I was young, but now see it as unproductive and predictable. Today, I’ll take kindness over cleverness.
The question about “wasting” your degree is interesting. I got a PhD & then a JD immediately afterwards and then became a lawyer, so the PhD could be seen as “wasted”. However, I never thought of it that way, because I learned so much and it helped me get jobs. But, tuition can be very expensive, so I can see where people would have to carefully consider whether a degree is worth it.