Yesterday, as usual, I started my morning coffee in the coffee-maker, fed my cat as it percolated, and curled up with my laptop to catch up reading on some blogs I follow. One of these blogs is
hand-made-love, a kind of online journal kept by Dawn Tan, an artist based in Melbourne. Although I've never met her, I feel like I know her. Maybe you have people you feel that way about. After reading her blog day after day for a while now and tagging along in her life, I feel I can accurately describe her as an upbeat, energetic sort of person. She's quirky and silly and paints colorful representations of milk cartons and sugar packaging and talking french fries. She's also a teacher, and she helps kids have fun expressing themselves with these same sorts of projects.
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| Dawn Tan's image, found here. |
So. It was very unusual to click onto her blog yesterday and find a post drenched in discouragement. For the sake of brevity (or at least, attempted brevity), I won't rehash the whole thing here, though I encourage you to read
her words as she said them. But basically, yesterday Dawn was lamenting the life of the freelance artist.
And I knew exactly how she felt.
She spoke of never knowing where your next job - read "paycheck" - is going to come from. Or if it will come. Will there be money for rent next month? Hard to say. How can you plan for the future or budget money that, at present, is little more than hope? Dawn talked about watching her friends go out - you know, the friends with the 9-5 jobs, complete with regular salary they can depend on, 401K plans to which their employers contribute, newly bought houses and really cute clothes - those friends. She spoke of watching them go out and have fun while she sits at home, working. Making art. Always making art. Because she can't afford not to. She can't afford to not be constantly seeking out commissions, advertising her work, encouraging people to buy it. Tweeting, blogging, bombarding people with promotions. Constantly racking her brain for new ideas, things to create, ways to make a living from them.
I know what that's like. It can start to feel like a never-ending fight upstream. My husband and I are artists - he's an illustrator, I'm a storyteller - and we both believe passionately in the value of what we do. And we desperately love what we do. You could even say that we lose ourselves in it. There is something mystical and electrifying about the process of creation. Making art enriches your inner spirit in a way that few things can. So I don't think, suffer as we do for it, that either of us could give it up.
But we do suffer for it. It's a quiet suffering. Most artists love what they do so we're willing to take the punches, brush ourselves off, and keep going without saying much about it, because, well, suffering is part of the job. But that doesn't mean it isn't a struggle. And there's the rub, that making art can drain you to the point of white-lipped exhaustion. It requires you to give out of the very essence of who you are, to be willing to go deep, all the way to the marrow, and ask the hard questions of yourself and wrestle with the inner demons in order that you might surface at the end with something of meaning to offer the world, something true, perhaps of beauty or hope, or something at least that can make a tired person laugh. And this can be especially difficult when the world, it would seem, is perfectly willing to let you starve in return. When it gets down to the wire, art is expendable after all. Right?
It can be a painful pill to swallow. It can mess with you if you aren't rooted and grounded in Someone's unconditional love. You can start to feel resentful. Undervalued. Bitter. And if you let these feelings go on too long, you can even start to make hollow art - art that isn't about anything but a paycheck. You start to live in angst about your financial situation and your lack of productivity and in that anxiety you begin to pounce on ideas and projects that don't actually have any Life in them. And the downward cycle continues.
I know because I've almost gone down that self-pitying path a few times.
It's only great Love that has saved me.
...
my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:20-23)
And I know I don't often explicitly talk about my faith on this blog, but this is one area where my relationship with God is so tangled into my ability to keep creating that I can't discuss the topic without bringing Him into it. (Hope you won't tune out.)
I find that as I turn my eyes to the cross, I am humbly hit with the reminder that in order for this hope to be offered to me, Another was pierced. And this Other is well acquainted with suffering.
He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53:3)
My church recently completed a study of the book of Revelation. It's a weird book, but for the first time, my pastor has helped me to love it, and amidst all the strange, psychedelic descriptions, I cannot get away from the image of the innocent slaughtered Lamb, who is Christ himself. Pierced for our transgressions. Crushed for our sins. The God who made himself nothing to suffer alongside us, to be wrongly accused and put to death by crucifixion, all for love, for the love of
us. The God who draws near to the suffering. Because he knows what it's like. And He will not turn away. It's the greatest comforting I've found.
Jesus, the Other of our souls, is the only one who can draw mystery into the ashes of our suffering and breathe life into our dry bones. Jesus is the only true Artist, and I find that the more time I spend with Him, the better my own art becomes. I can't explain it logically. I can only say that when I show up to Him with all my brokenness and frustration and questions about being an artist and whether or not the hardships are worth it, my Father smiles at me and invites me instead to, "Come up here". He carries me heavenward and shows me a new perspective entirely. I am lifted from my narrowly focused world and all things which seem to matter most begin shifting around within me. I start to feel hope. And with that bubbling of hope comes joy. Spilling laughter. New openings in the world emerge . Cracks of possibility where the light shines through. Like a resurrection, a rolling away of the stone, a movement from death into inspired life, transforming the old earth into the New Earth.
And suddenly I am aware of beauty all around me, and a hunger for more of it. And hunger to co-create with it. And God, in his mercy, allows this. He chooses to use my childlike scribbling, created in faith, as a conduit for the transformation to come. Heaven coming down, an invasion of the kingdom of light. Apparently, we can learn to create backwards - not out of our limited humanity, but out of our
full humanity to come. We allow God's Life, both here and not yet, to invade ours, to mold our expressive hearts, so that our future (perfected) humanity can flow through our art now.
I hear what some of you may be thinking as you read this - wonderful for me that I've found this source of renewal, but that still doesn't pay the bills. No, I suppose it doesn't, directly. But honestly, the change in perspective is worth it. To be able to give the burden away. Celebrity culture tempts us to be the center of our own creative acts - it's all about me me me getting the credit I deserve, but when the center is "the still point of the turning world" (T.S. Eliot), true creativity is birthed, unleashing future grace into the eye of the storm.
We artists have to keep living on and being stewards of the old earth and its systems, but we also get to be imaginative conduits of the New. And in my book, that's worth being a part of. That's worth suffering for.
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