Where's the Line and How do I Cross It?

This post kind of continues along the lines of the last one, touching on the struggle between working for someone else and working for your art; that eternal struggle to have the time and energy to pursue your creative goals more fully. With focused effort and hard work towards lofty goals, yes it's possible to pursue your dream (evidenced by successful full-time artists), but where do you draw the line? At what point do you just go for it fully and how exactly do you even do that? (Those aren't rhetorical questions, I would really like to know the answer). Sometimes it can seem like every day for years is a struggle just to find motivation for a bit of creative juice and the energy and time to utilize it.

There are millions of us in this world who say well I am really a writer or I am working here, but I really am a painter. That last leg of the journey to doing your art full time requires a lot of risk taking, and sometimes it seems like I don't even know how to approach that risk. Well the first step obviously is creating the work, and the best way to do that is in solitude, found in the time necessary to be free and do the work.

"To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply."
-Charles Baudelaire

You always hear the stories of great artists and writers, musicians, etc. who were born into a comfortable life, whose fathers and mothers taught them their art from the time they were born, and introduced them to all the proper connections their whole life. That is often the story when you read the biography of famous artists of the past. How many people who are given the gift of being able to dream deeply, are allowed the time and the effort needed to truly use this gift?

Working full-time or part-time even at a job that's not ideal because one has bills to pay and of course being tired after the day is done can seem as I said before, like an endless cycle. Maybe you get a little work done doing what you truly love to do, but I also imagine what I could do with a fully laid out wide open studio and lots of time (who doesn't though right?).

Speaking specifically though about Baudelaire's words above and dreaming.... One summer a number of years ago I did have the luxury of time, freedom and the concentration to write my dreams down every day. Where at first it seemed like a lot of random crazy objects, people, and events; after a few weeks a pattern emerged. Like filling in a puzzle that you don't have the whole picture to yet but eventually it starts to make sense. I am well on way in this journey of filling out that puzzle that is my art, with a bit of luck maybe eventually I'll be able to fill it in and complete the whole picture, or at least start to get some major holes filled in!

The Symbolist Movement of the Late 1800's

My last post included a work from French symbolist painter Odilon Redon. I would like to discuss the Symbolist movement in more detail with this post. They are a group of late 19th and early 20th century artists and poets, including Jean Moreas (who published the symbolist manifesto in 1886), Charles Baudelaire, Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, and Paul Gauguin among many others.

Odilon Redon, Cyclops, 1904.

Originating in France, with many German influences as well, it consisted of not just artists, but poetry and other arts also. Here is a quote from Jean Moreas from the aforementioned symbolist manifesto:

"In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals."

- Jean Moreas, Le Manifeste du Symbolisme, Le Figaro, 1886

Symbolism was a reaction to the realist or naturalism movement that also originated in France in the mid 19th century. (Which in itself was a reaction to romanticism, the cycle never ends!) The symbolists sought to express a more ideal reality, rather than the rigid and emotionless works of the realists. One of the main influences of artists in the symbolist movement was their dreams. Let's hear from the French poet and symbolist Charles Baudelaire on this point:

"Common sense tells us that terrestrial things have but a faint existence and that reality itself is only found in dreams."

- Charles Baudelaire, Les Paradis Artificiels

I couldn't agree more with those words. If you read my last post on the fact that all matter is energy, this would imply that dreams on some level are indeed real. Yes some dreams are just because you ate pizza right before bed, but some dreams are much more than that. Some are also just a reflection of your mind, and the things it observes every day. In any case my dreams have provided me with inspiration and a re-interpretation of my own ideas in ways my conscious mind would of never done.

Jean Delville, Orpheus, 1893.

Although I don't dig all of the work by the symbolists (still too real for my taste), I dig that they made efforts to break away from expressing or rather merely recreating the physical material world, and expressing more spiritual truths and ideals. I know I have harped on this point before, about that criticism of some modern art that goes, "a five year old could paint that" or "I could do that". That kind of thinking misses the point entirely on non-objective art. The point is not a showcase of how well you can recreate life with paint and a brush, the point is to express whatever the hell I want to and if you don't like it, go look at something else! Alright I got a little excited there, but I don't create to get validation, I create to express myself, and in so doing, learn more about my self.

On Copying Nature

I could not agree exactly more with French Poet and Critic Charles Baudelaire and his quote below:

"I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial."

-Charles Baudelaire (1821 -1867)

I never understood the value of painting still-life's, other than maybe some basic skill training with a brush or pencil. An evolved artist moves beyond a desire to recreate what they see, into reinterpreting what they see. Or creating something entirely new, using varying degrees of subjectivity or completely non-representational, conceptual approaches to expression. I don't buy into that myth that everything's already been done. As individuals we are unique and have the ability to share a completely original form of expression, whatever that may be, by limiting that vision to simply recreating images from concrete reality, is a travesty.

Romanticism is Modern Art

The French do have a way with words. One of my other favorite poets is also a Frenchman; Rimbaud. But let's look at this quote from Charles Baudelaire:

"To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art -- that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.”

-Charles Baudelaire (French Poet, 1821-1867)

Very eloquent too, are his words, and very true. the invention of the camera freed the artist from the bounds of merely recreating life and opened the floodgates into the realm of creating reflections of the spirit; and everything that Baudelaire says above. This is another instance of me not being able to say it better, no matter how many words I try to use.