"The Magnificent Bicep"...

 After Robin Williams died, Peter Coyote, now a Buddhist Monk, wrote a piece regarding his relationship with Robin, and what he said in it is profoundly interesting to me as an artist.  

"Normally when you are gifted with a huge talent of some kind, it’s like having a magnificent bicep. People will say, “Wow, that’s fantastic” and they tell you, truthfully, that it can change your life, take you to unimaginable realms. It can and often does. The Zen perspective is a little different. We might say, “Well, that’s a great bicep, you don’t have to do anything to it. Let’s work at bringing the rest of your body up to that level.”   

I rarely have the good fortune to run across messages like this. Usually, the world claims to be so blown away by my talent that they offer nothing further for me to ponder. Or, if they are an art critic, they hammer me with questions of relevance and demean me because I don’t subscribe to art theory.   They do always ask me of course, if I make a living as an artist, or if I am selling, which always makes me feel more alone, unless I happen to be selling at that moment. Whatever the comments the world makes to me about my art, usually the result is that I feel lonelier and more set apart from others.  Not this quote however. Coyote goes on to say,  

"Robin’s gift could be likened to fastest thoroughbred race-horse on earth. It had unbeatable endurance, nimbleness, and a huge heart. However, it had never been fully trained. Sometimes Robin would ride it like a kayaker tearing down white-water, skimming on the edge of control. We would marvel at his courage, his daring, and his brilliance. But at other times, the horse went where he wanted, and Robin could only hang on for dear life...had the horse been trained (it might have saved his life)"  

Finally the real challenge! Not that I am comparing myself to Robin Williams necessarily – you have never heard of me… but I am an artist who has been an artist since I was a kid. I was encouraged by my parents. I drew and painted and made things out of clay or string or sand or paper every chance I got. I barely graduated from high school except for art which was my saving grace and I went on to art school in New York City, to the School of Visual Arts. 

I graduated and became an editorial illustrator for 5 years at which point I got totally blocked and started to go crazy from not being able to do art, and then took a class in intuitive painting which freed me completely - forever. 

I left the city and became a fine artist in Woodstock, NY – still couldn’t make a living though except as a bad waitress… tried tattooing…which I am going back to now... went on to get my MFA and still couldn’t market myself outside of school, went back to working and being an artist living on nothing. 

I moved to Denver, CO in 2006, taught college fine art classes at the Art Institute of CO as an adjunct and got laid off in 2008 after the crash.  At that point, I lived as a fine artist nearly homeless for 6 years, freelancing and vending till I got a job at Safeway in late 2014. All the while, painting up a storm, but never really selling although trying to follow the directions published on the internet of how to sell… 

…and finally read this and found something to relate to... Many years ago, the artist was the shaman of the tribe – foretold the future – was the High Priestess and had purpose, giving the people a material vision for their spiritual world. In addition the artist documented events starting with the first cave paintings to wild west encounters to court sketches. Now  that has been replaced by the camera – and most recently digital imaging software.   

Artists are unnecessary to the culture except as entertainers. At one point, when I was in art school in New York, I thought – I could dress up in army gear and get a sub-machine gun and shoot a bunch of cans of paint onto a canvas covered in glue… that would have gotten me a name in New York in the mid-80s along with classmates such as Madonna and Keith Herring...

But I did not, because that is not who I am and that felt inauthentic. So I still paint – I have given away bodies of work to family – have sold some. I  just recently sold a piece over a controversy in a Boulder Gallery funded by government money that kicked me out over some issues of sexuality in my work – the painting in question sold on Facebook… 

and I still paint and work my day job… The challenge of being gifted with a talent - that the world does not understand and then not being able to ever find a way to train it, because the world has always wanted to commercialize it, to take what it can from it.   

In other words, having a gift and talent does not guaranty anything – in fact, according to this article, it should be a challenge to the self to bring every other part of the artist’s self up to the level of the natural talent. So then to develop compassion, honesty, generosity, optimism, and focused endeavor that come up to the standard of the natural gift, would be the artist’s life goal! 

Instead of riding the wild horse and being led way off track, time and time again – with some amazing highs, but some terrible lows. And then, how to train the creative aspect to be of service to the Higher Good rather than to the capitalist ideal of something as silly as “selling art”, for example. 

 That changes things. I had been weeping about not knowing how to market myself for the umpteenth time… which is true, of course – when my real challenge in life could be to become a rocket scientist at service to others. 

Maybe I have sold out? I did live purely as an artist (or a con-artist) from 2008-2014, after being laid off from the Art Institute of CO after the crash. I basically couch-surfed – I house sat and I painted the inside of a friend’s house for 2 years which should have been 8 months… I did freelance graphic design a lot and I sold grilled-cheese sandwiches on the 16th Street Mall in Denver, and I also developed my psychic ability with my art so that I can scry drawings for people… 

I even flew a sign on Santa Fe Drive and 8th that said “$ for Art” and sold one piece that way for $2…as an experiment.

I went home to NoCal for 8 months and brought a homeless brain-damaged veteran back with me to Denver and got him set up in the Lakewood Domiciliary and was later given a place to live with him to be his caretaker… while working at Safeway…in the end, when it was all said and done this is when I realized something about what is really important now. 

I realized that there are so many more important things that I could use my creative artist’s mind to do than to be concerned with selling my work – creating art is an incredibly self-serving obsession – and I do it – because I pray by making things – but maybe there are some creative solutions I could put my out-of-the-box thinking toward that would actually address some of the problems I witness around me. 

I have highly developed intuition as a result of 25 years of creating intuitive art and maybe I could pray to be of service to others in a creative way.  The more service I do for others, the more creative energy I have to create art. It’s interesting.