I have returned home to Manitoba from The Bahamas with many gifts. While I was there I was able to walk along the beaches and collect some beautiful shells. While on these walks I was very inspired to take many pictures and have a renewed interest in editing and posting these collections on this blog. I found a renewed sense of what I wanted for my art practice, moving it from the ephemeral back into tangible work. I have returned home to Manitoba with shells, new photography collections, and a beautiful sense of direction for what it might look like to be a professional artist.
The vision of being a professional artist is not new. There are many dreams I have had about what being an artist looks like, and variations for what I want to do with this “one precious life.” I have written before on the difficulty of being a polymath in a world that rewards monoliths. I am not an artist who can only do one thing. Any vision of my future, if it is to become real, must take into account not only my many different mediums, but also my different lifestyles. These include living in an off-grid cabin, seasonal cruising in coastal Britain, and adventure riding a motorcycle through parts unknown.
In one of my dream futures I imagine myself as an artist who travels with my camera and shares images, prints, and assemblage works with audiences through exhibits, blogs, and in an online store. In this dream future I am a professional artist able to sustain myself with my art practice which is integrated with my personal semi-nomadic life informed by a post-capitalist imagination.
At this particular moment, this vision feels like a beautiful but far off dream.
I have lived long enough to know that dreams do come true, however, I am also old enough to know that most dreams are not composed of large dramatic leaps, but of many tiny steps—usually slow, sometimes tedious, generally plodding.
If there is some beautiful future where I am travelling on a motorcycle through Mongolia with my camera, the dream did not start there.
It begins here and now, in this little 200 square foot cabin making digital folders on my laptop, sorting through the thousands of images I took in The Bahamas, culling what doesn’t quite work, editing the small selection that does, scrutinizing my personal aesthetic, labelling, tagging and posting each one. It begins on this blog, posting every day. It begins with the belief that my work has value and that some folks will want to purchase it, and making that possible.
In other words, dreams take action, risk, and leaps, yes—but they also take to boring work of admin. If the water gifted me a vision for how I can integrate my travel with my art practice, it also gifted me with a mountain of admin, the first practical steps along that road, and the motivation to tackle it.
And I am here for it–every slow plodding step up that mountain.
See you tomorrow.
