Eccentric Flower:200002/Art Craft and Marc

I have so little time these days that I read journals in fits and starts. I haven't actually had a chance to read Susan's journal for weeks, but since I'm finally having dinner with her tonight, I figured I had better catch up.

In one entry she throws down her metaphorical pen and says in frustration, "How do people manage to write and also have other jobs?"

The answer is that usually they don't.

I have gone from nearly seven thousand words a week to less than a thousand, and the big difference is that I'm actually having to think about my job, actually labor a little. Normally my job is a breeze. Right now it's work. Poof - everything else grinds to a halt. I have been working on "The Jaguar's Wife" for three days and I can't seem to get more than a page written per sitting. Too tired. This is not the way to get a story finished.

But I just bought a house. (The inspection went swimmingly, the lawyer has been contacted, the purchase and sale papers are being signed on Thursday. After that it's mostly just a long wait until we close.) I have bills to pay. And I decided a long time ago that my art was going to be secondary to my comfort. So I have forfeited my right to complain.

Others might make the opposite choice. Marc, I think, would gladly live on a park bench under some newspapers, as long as he had a regular supply of art materials.

Marc has been taking the measure of some local art schools, and they of him. The response is rather more enthusiastic on their side than his. He's decided that art school is a good idea (for reasons to be discussed in a moment), but he's coming to grips with what I've been telling him for years: That it won't be pleasant.

See, Marc was actually surprised to realize that his work was better than most of the work he saw there. (Picture me shaking my head in dismay.)

Okay, it's true that I've been his primary audience for over ten years, and I'm a tough crowd. Tough because I am jaded about most of the things he can already do well - having seen a great deal of his work - and therefore rather demanding. Tough because I prefer to receive constructive criticism rather than praise, and therefore, reciprocally, I don't praise him very much. But when it comes down to it, I always tell him the truth, and the truth is that Marc is one of these fortunate bastards who can do anything they want to do with their hands.

Any hands-on skill, Marc can do it flawlessly and with panache after only a brief learning period. I have not yet seen an exception. And not just art. Marc only began cooking this year. Before that, he was in the microwave-pizza-and-ramen league. Just never had any inclination to do so. He started this year to save money. He's now working his way through Julia Child's The Way To Cook and he hasn't had a misstep yet. His mirepoix vegetables were cut into perfectly cubical microscopic dice, all exactly the same size. His duxelles were divine. His puff pastry was perfect.

And he doesn't understand. He doesn't understand why the teachers at the art schools are so happy to see him. He doesn't understand that most art students are poseurs who are trying to avoid earning a living, or are there because they consider it a cooler place to be than business school. (Well, it is, but I don't consider that a sound reason for attending.) That they make the kind of art which consists of standing a fork on a podium and titling it "Persistence of Memory" or some such.

Okay, I'm being harsh. Let's try it this way. Art and craft do not have to overlap. You can certainly have art without learning the related craft. But I happen to feel - and there are others who feel this too - that learning the craft vastly enriches the art.

Or - to pick a specific example - while it is not necessary to learn to draw realistically in order to draw impressively and expressively, it'll help a great deal. I feel that if you're going to draw a Dr. Seuss toucan, it helps to be able to draw a John James Audubon toucan first.

The only reason I am encouraging Marc to go to art school at all - where I feel, frankly, that he will quickly reach the limits of what useful information they can teach him - is so he can exploit their resources. The last five years of his life have been a constant battle to find wheels, kilns, shelf space, clay, and other such things. Marc can fill a kiln every two days when he's in a white heat. I cannot recall a single time (well, this last year has come close) when the infrastructure he's had available has been able to cope with his output. And Marc is not just interested in clay, but other things - like a glassblowing kiln - have been completely unavailable to him.

I want him to go and impress them so much that they not only let him in, but pay his way (which is looking like a strong possibility). Then I want him to wring them dry.

He's going to have one philosophical problem, though. He's already wrestling with it. We talked about it last night quite a bit (which is where this entry's coming from). And it goes back to art vs. craft again.

Marc makes art without message. He always has. In fact, he insists on it. When you look at Marc's art, you will take nothing away except aesthetic appreciation, unless it's also functional ware, in which case you can also use it as a bowl or a pot or whatever. But his sculptures, for example, are defiantly non-representational. You can see all sorts of interesting things in them, but they're not "supposed" to look like anything.

No politics in Marc's art. No commentary. No philosophy. It is "merely" interesting to look at. And for Marc, that's enough. But for some in the art community, it is not.

Marc is so gun-shy about even putting even the merest hint of a message into his work that he's getting nervous about this series of busts he's planning. He's done one bust - a male head - one of the only representational works he's ever made. It's very good, and he'd like to do others, but since he really only wants to do busts of men - cute men - he's worried that people will say, "Oh, yes, well, he's a gay man and he's making some kind of statement here."

You want to make Marc mad? Accuse him of making a statement. To his mind, art should not say anything about the artist. It should speak for itself.

I can understand that. I was so leery of being accused of autobiography that it blinded me to the idea that I was turning Quarter Moon into a book it didn't want to be. Now it looks like two books badly welded together. I resent the notion that all art is somewhat autobiographical. Hell, I even resent the notion that this journal has to be autobiographical. Like most people, I love talking about myself, but I have also been brought up to think that it is seldom appropriate to talk about one's self. And every time I do, I get nervous. I have few enough friends as it is without boring them with my ego.

Which may be why I've spent this whole entry talking about Marc.