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Burnout and artistry
I'm having a Chinua Achebe week: one where things fall apart.
I don't know if it was the Monday holiday or something else giving me this feeling, but on both Tuesday and Wednesday I felt like I was running in place. Treading water. Doing a lot of work but getting very little accomplished, if you understand my meaning.
Then I sat down last night to work on mouth organ. Around nine p.m. I realized I had made a serious error; it was too late to change topics, but the material I was working with was so dense - and I had so much to say about it - that I'd be up until all hours of the night just trying to get through it, even skimping on the facts and compressing as much as I possibly could. I was trapped.
My editor conked out about eleven, as is typical for her; I kept going until nearly two am, when I reached a logical stopping point in the prose and reluctantly slapped up a sign which said, in effect, "continued next week."
It was a prose Waterloo. I am still convinced that the column grows more tedious the further it goes. By the end I had simply run out of steam. I haven't heard a lot of shouting today, though, so either everyone else liked it more than I did, or no one is reading it.
Ultimately I didn't stay up much later than I usually do, but today - perhaps because I had literally burned out my brain - I was a total loss. I went to work (at my usual time), sat in a meeting without hearing it, logged onto my computer for all of about ten minutes before realizing that my eyes were just not focusing on the words. Went home. Went back to sleep for two hours. Got up and made coffee. So it was one pm before anything useful began to flow from my head and fingers.
I have a lot of comments from people about my most recent rant (conversations, information, and elitism), and I want to talk about some of this most excellent and provocative email. The problem is, that will take brainpower I just haven't got at the moment. So be patient.
Meanwhile, can I share with you one of the last items left on my list of Unfulfilled Topics from a few days ago? So I can clear it out of my head? Thanks.
The cover story of Smithsonian this month is about Maxfield Parrish. Now, if you've never seen a Parrish painting, they're gorgeous - vivid blues and oranges and amazing landscapes, part reality, part fantasy. Parrish was the artist I wanted to be, for many years (until I discovered some others I liked even more).
The thing is, many Serious Students of Art do not take Parrish's work as seriously as I'd like them to ... primarily because he did advertising art, calendars, things like that. The term they usually apply to Parrish is "illustrator."
I resent that.
"Illustrator," at its most complimentary, can only imply good craftsmanship. It cannot connote the creativity, the spark of vision, that moves something beyond mere craftsmanship. Parrish's works - yes, even his paintings for a light bulb manufacturer - deserve to be called "art."
This goes beyond Parrish. It's an elitist bias, is what it is.
No, no, wait! Don't leave! I can explain that.
My mother had a book about several artists, all of whom did exemplary work, all of whom had a distinct creative vision and an easily recognized visual style. They were (let's see if I can remember them all):
N.C. Wyeth
Howard Pyle
Maxfield Parrish
Howard Chandler Christy
Charles Dana Gibson
James Montgomery Flagg
Frederick Remington
J.C. Leyendecker
Norman Rockwell
John Held, Jr.
Now, I don't care for some of these folks - Held's art has never done much for me, for example. But (with the possible exception of Christy), each of these people pioneered a style all their own - and each has been often imitated. To this list I would add Peter Newell and George Petty (of pin-up fame) ... and we would have a fairly complete list of American artists whose reputations were hurt because they made their living doing commercial work.
The book didn't call them "artists," by the by. It called them "illustrators."
The reason this is an elitist bias: The highbrows can say, "Well, a true artist paints for the sake of her work and never, never sullies her hands with filthy commerce." The highbrows can form an opinion of Great Art on the basis of their soirees to the museums and galleries - where Leyendecker is ne'er to be seen. The rest of us form an opinion of art based on what we see around us every day.
How many people have seen Norman Rockwell's "Freedom from Want" (that's the one with the family sitting around a table, with the patriarch and matriarch at the far end preparing to carve an enormous turkey) in a magazine somewhere - or as one of its numerous pop-culture parodies? Show of hands, please. Good. Now, how many have seen the original painting in whatever museum owns it today? Which method reaches more people?
Insisting that art is only what gets bought by museums is an exclusionary idea.
I'm not saying that all commercial art is good, or that all advertisements deserve to be judged as art (although there are plenty of advertising awards that do exactly that). I'm saying that for an artist to make a living by lending her work to commercial ends is no disgrace ... and that art is art, no matter where it appears.
Okay, my brain's warming up now. Maybe I'll do the other rant today after all. We'll see.
© Columbine
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