Feeling very agitated. No sales and no prospects it seems.
I have not been on anti-depressants for a goodly while, but fear the black dog is on its way. I am totally unsatisfied with every single thing: work, art, home, web and social media. I have 540+ 'friends' on Facebook, but none seem plugged into this. Partly my own fault, in that I do not have the skills to become some Damien Hirst-type entrepreneur. It'd be nice to be recognised and make a fair income from this daubs, but success seems further away by the day. I expect too much; I always have. But the world constantly disappoints - sex, love, family, school, and not to mention myself.
The human condition is to be alone in the crowded room, and the artist stands well without the normal congress and compass. I understand now why Plato banished the artist from Utopia. We stare and criticise, but offer no solutions. Wilde was so right when he said all art is useless. Perhaps it only soothes the producer and the ultimate owner. And let me be clear here, I do not mean the amateur, the Sunday painter, the purveyor of nice decorative pieces. My art can veer towards the pretty, especially the 'abstracted' stuff, but I have deliberately avoided posting those on this platform. I may well be misguided in that decision. There is the looming realisation that the supposedly gay content of some of the work will not appeal, or may indeed alienate. We seem, nonetheless, to inhabit a universe wherein the whinge and the whine are the main modes of expression, be it the initial statement or those of the trolls that tear it apart.
I should have gone to art school. There is no doubt. I had precocious talent, but my private school attempted to banish it altogether. Art was for those that might not get the guaranteed total of passes. The national average for O levels at the time was 4. I was sent to an exam factory that implicitly guaranteed double that number; I di 12. And then went on to do 5 As when the usual was between two and three. I should have rebelled and refused to do Art History, though now it seems to have helped in may ways - I have kept my artistic integrity and am able to take part in that mythical thing: the dialogue with the continuum. Mind you, I tend to see the influences and references AFTER I have made the work. After all, there can be very few serious practitioners who wake up and say, 'Today I will explore the role of Venus in the post-post-Modern era!'
I should be working like a slave, but I am waiting on a sale or response to my work to permit me to start again. I make myself do backgrounds, do this thing here, post on Instagram. I may manage another 'How to' video shortly, but it is too much a chore to be enjoyable and therefore well done. I miss art galleries, though podcasts from INAH and The Barnes and Frick, for example keep my brain ticking over, and the former stretches my rusty Spanish.
I need a lithe male model to draw, and want to start teaching life-drawing again by the autumn. I love being in the class with teens, but as a non-contracted teacher, I get the cover lessons, which can be like babysitting on the one hand, or the hardest thing possible, depending on the work set and the group's reaction to not having their normal teacher.
They say life is more than just a read-through, but there are moments when I think i had the wrong script entirely, or it was printed in a language I don't understand. I can read Cyrillic letters and know a handful of words, but that's not enough to get even the gist of the text.
So that is setting out my stall more fully, fairly certain no-one will read it. It's like 'The Cub-Hunting Season;' no-one bought it, no-one read it. Except my grandmother and she was outraged by it. A life lesson in there somewhere, but I missed my cue, or held the book upside-down.