You know the story. It's
the story of our 2000's everyman. You live in a tiny Irish back-arse
of no where town (rather, your family does). You have your green
fields childhood. You make art all the time. You have an
uncomfortable and secluded, supremely nerdy adolescence. You still
make art all the time. Then, you go to the big city for College. You are
born. Experiences and friendships and relationships flood and whirl
around you like glorious colourful magic. It's all wonderful and
exciting. You grow delirious, dizzy and confused. You haven't made
any art in a long time. You start to hear and read a lot about the economic
crisis. You get to study it in college. And unemployment. And
emigration. More and more of your friends post on their facebook feeds
about the comedic dole-collecting videos made by their Youtube
sensation friends and about their own arrangements to leave the
country.
You walk out of your last
exam. You move out. You go home. To that place that you haven't
thought of as home in years. Maybe you tried to find a job, maybe you
didn't. You move back in with your parents. You take a good look around, settle back in front of your laptop and throw up Facebook.
I never thought that I'd
find myself in that predicament.
And yet, here we are. Back
up in Donegal. All around my bedroom lie the scaffolding and
half-constructed castles of my teenage ambitions. When I wanted
nothing more than to draw comicbooks and bring a delicious, fat
portfolio to Image Comics headquarters. How things change. How much I
have convinced myself of. Up until I moved back home, I was
contemplating internships and masters. And even...for about two
seconds...the dreaded LLB.
**shudders**
I didn't want to butcher my
inner-child's self-esteem that much.
So, now that I'm out of
the system, there is only one left to do: make art. All the time.
Fantastic, massive art, all the time. Fill my house with stacks of
canvases leaning against each other, clogging the hallways, shelves
of resource books and magazines, infinite folders on my laptop with
cropped cuttings of jpegs and loaded, catalogued online galleries.
Nothing left but do exactly what 16 year old me has been waiting
for me to start doing for these centuries of self-development.
But it's terrifying.
Making art and following
my art to wherever it decides to take me is monstrously scary. It is
overwhelming; full of doubt and paranoia. Forget that I'm faced with
the underdevelopment of a cohesive and accessible “art market”,
in Ireland and everywhere (I have a LOT to write about with regards
that, you'll see); the tremors and tempests of the self is the worst.
The. Worst. And for being an artist, unfortunately, it's more than
relevant. It's the deal breaker. The clincher. The figurative be-all
and end-all for real commitment to the field. And how easily that
commitment comes in and out of breathing, like the living dead. It
dies, then resurrects itself, then dies again, leaving you, the artist,
completely self-admonished.
The self.
The self-trust, the
self-discipline, the self-discovery and solidifying
self-determination. The massive self-confrontation you have to do and
the self-deconstruction you have to do, along-side that hideous
dismantlement of systemic habits and side effects about 20 years of
the conventional education and career system has afflicted you with. You're like a small nation after a revolution or a dog staring into a mirror - you have to be ready to rewrite everything.
All of this art-exercising
and art-exorcising (wahey) will definitely provide more than enough content for
my blog all on it's own (I still need to design my header, logo,
profile...stay connected). Besides, there is my need to comment on
art, on art developments, on the art world and on artists, those
quirky, kamikaze creatures. On why we need art to stay
alive, on why RIGHT NOW IN 2012 art is more important that ever
(yadda yadda)...
For the first time
in about eight years, I have the time, the lack of dire money
shortages (I work for my mum as a psychiatric secretary, our office
is downstairs, my living quarters are upstairs) and I have the
physical space necessary to start arting the fuck out of my
generational lethargy. This is it. As Rob Lowe's character, Billy
Hicks, from one of my favourite coming-of-age films of all time, St.
Elmo's Fire, famously says to his break-down, clinically depressed
mess of a friend, “We're all going through this. It's our
time at the edge.”
Some people go to
Australia or Thailand or back to college to find themselves. I went
home.
Oh, and RSS feed me, bro.
