The popular envy of the artist may be based largely on the prevalent romantic misperceptions about his life. Those artists, after all, who choose to pursue success from a grimy garret (or from a subtropical paradise) are the distinct minority. Most artists hold work-a-day jobs which leave time for creation in the interstitial and left over spaces - those same times when grass must be mowed and bookshelves built.
If I seem to complain, I will add that it is still the most satisfying life I have yet known, for the mind may dance when the feet and fingers may not. It is, though, hardly the careless world of the public imagination, or if it is, it will be a hungry world of compromised comforts like that of the ordinary unemployed. Many people, of course, have undergone such limited privation as students or when first on their own - it is not a grim life and it has its simple rewards, but for many who have gone on to other habits of life, the ordinariness and bother of limited money would seem magnified.
So it seems to many artists as well. As untrue as it is in many ways, artists are just plain folks too.
Drawing for reproduction is marvelously free. One can add, delete, cut and shift as he never can when doing a "drawing;" A blotchy sheet of different papers. "wite-out," blue pencil lines, and magic tape prints as cleanly as a 30 second sketch.
No comments:
Post a Comment