I
was an artist that had some success at one time and dropped out of the business
side of it long before I got sober. I have only recently returned to the
creative arts as a writer, and, as a writer new to the scene, the query and
rejection side have been a humbling experience that reminds me of the struggles
I had as a young man. When I began to
carve out a career in a field that requires a certain amount of ego: as much
technical skill but significantly more ego than, say, a machinist or plumber,
there was always the gnawing suspicion in the back of my mind that perhaps I
wasn’t good enough to make it.
There are very
few professions where the product and the producer are so intimately connected.
Am I good enough and is my craft, my product, the expression of my soul, good
enough for people to buy… enough to provide a living for myself? I.e.;
someone in sales, an electrician or a carpenter, hardly ever have to ask
this question because the answer is so very obvious in terms of financial
success. In those careers economic demands dictate right away and you are forced to go on
to doing something else. But the creative artist might even struggle a lifetime
only to find in the end that there never was an audience for her/his chosen
vocation. We have to be okay with that and keep plugging away or we don’t have
a chance in hell to do anything of significance. Art is a craft: it is a trade:
it is a vocation: a calling that it is a spiritual quest in which the ego falls away.
geo, 4,637
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