What drives your work and the direction of your artistic journey?
A lot of the struggles that artists deal with come from areas that ignore or even deny who we really are and what we really want. The problem is, it is very hard to discern who we are and what we really want from the constant, nonstop bombardment of other people’s ideas about what makes a perfect, fulfilled, content, and successful life. I propose we use the concept of authenticity as a base from which to root our exploration of ourselves and what our individual, personal, and unique meaning of success is.
Join the conversation about the importance of truth and honesty in your creative pursuits, asking questions like…
- What is authenticity and why is it important for artists?
- How can artists find their authentic selves?
- What are the benefits of creating from an authentic place?
- How can artists stay true to their authentic selves in their artistic endeavors?
And when I say, join the conversation, I mean it. Send me your thoughts and answers to the episode’s questions or send your own ideas on art and creativity to share in a future podcast.
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Then come back for the next installment. Until next time, keep that muse fed!
Credits:
Cover design by Sage; Illustration by Olga Kostenko
Music by Playsound
Transcription (AI transcribed, unedited due to lack of budget. Please excuse the copious errors.)
Hello all you beautiful artistic people. Welcome back to the Sage arts podcast. I’m Sage Bray Varon, your host and instigator of all kinds of creative rabblerousing. So come on in and have a seat. I’m in my little closet sized office, my podcasting niche, again today. It’s a bit nippy outside for southern California, there’s no sun, but I rather enjoy this. Reminds me of Colorado although we have no hope of snow. Or rain any time soon either. But when I’m at the front of the house, I get to look out on a mini redwood forest the previous owners planted and on days like this I imagine I’m in the northwest of the US, where water is a lot more abundant than it is down here. So, I am enjoying the weather.
It’s approaching the end of my day here so I’m lounging at the recording table with a small glass of southern comfort, just on the rocks. I know it’s not a popular beverage but its a favorite of my husband’s and mine. It looks like whiskey so when I’m drinking one of these out at a restaurant or bar, I look like a really tough chick but it’s a bit more froufrou than just whiskey. It’s actual a citrus and vanilla mix in a really mild whiskey base so when you looking for it, it’s sometimes in the whiskey section, sometimes in the liquer section. It doesn’t really fit into the standard liquor categories which is probably one of the reasons I like it. I like things that don’t fit neatly under a label. Like most artists I know.
Speaking of bases and things that don’t quite fit, let’s continue to lay a base for the fun and exploration I’m hoping to get you into this coming year with a subject I’m going to put under a single word for convenience but like most labels, an explanation is necessary if you don’t want to be misunderstood.
For those of you who have been with me through previous publications and projects, you know that I like themes. I try to keep them, loosey-goosey, but I think having a specific theme to work off of gives all of us focus, grounding everything I have to offer you in some contained set of expectations.
Now, this December I don’t really have a theme because I’m just getting some episodes out to give you a taste of what you can expect and give myself time to work out the bugs before we really get going come January. But you might note after today that a theme is kind of emerging already – these first two conversations focus on your personal and internal decision-making. I’ll expand upon that with a few more focused conversations before the end of the month which will get us ready to hit the ground running with the first full blown episode January 6. I’ll be joined by Christi Friesen then, my first guest co-host and interview. We’ve already done the recording for it and I gotta tell you, we had the best conversation. She is so much fun and we even coined a new inspirational phrase which I won’t tell you about yet but come join us on January 6 to hear about that. I know it might sound odd to be excited about tagline kind of thing but I’m telling you, it’s so perfect for pretty much all artists. And that’ll give you something to look forward to.
Okay, onto the conversation of the day. In the previous episode we talked about intention, a subject I’m pretty passionate about so if you didn’t get to listen to that yet, please do. I cannot emphasize enough how important intention is in everything you do artistically, not just in creating your individual pieces, but also developing your style or even brand, as well as how you live your life, your life/work balance and even deciding what kind of creative career you want. Then that feeds into what you want for the whole of your life, for your family and for your long-term goals.
Today’s subject is related but has serious implications for everything you do. The word we’ll work with is authenticity. The word, unfortunately, has kinda been bandied around a lot lately to the point that I think it’s lost some of its meaning but as an umbrella for future discussions, it’s the right word for us. Authenticity is about truth and honesty and I think I want that to be the overriding theme for the conversations this next year. It’s not that I have the conversations mapped out for the whole 12 months or anything but I think that authenticity can be the foundation for all kinds of discussions as well as for the challenge that I’m going to propose we start mid- January.
Let’s start with a question I’d like you to ask yourself as you listen: “What drives your work and the direction of your artistic journey?”
I’m going to propose that your authentic self is the best driver of what you do creatively but I’m not the one to decide what is best for you which is why I think, first of all, you should identify whether you work from a place of authenticity or if you are driven by other internal or external forces and then start to work through what sources you want to influence your art and what you do with it.
So here’s my thoughts. I want to dive into authenticity because I think a lot of the struggles that artists deal with often come from areas that ignore or even deny who we really are and what we really want. And I think it happens in large part because we aren’t simple creatures and we don’t live simple lives, especially in this day and age, where we are constantly being told what we should do, what we shouldn’t do, and, very deliberately and obviously, even what we want. We get fed these ideas about what our lives should be and what we should be reaching for. However, no one can tell you that except for yourself.
There’s nothing wrong in taking advice and hearing other people’s thoughts on what works best for them, but at the end of the day, you have to decide what actually works for you.
The problem is it is very hard for us to extract our ideas of who we are and what we need from the constant, nonstop bombardment of other people’s ideas about what makes a perfect, fulfilled, content, and successful life. But keep in mind, most of the time when someone tells you how you should be or tries to feed you the idea of what a dream life should look like, they are trying to sell you something. Even what I’m doing is kind of selling you something although it’s not about making money. I want you to have a rewarding creative life and the things that I talk about will always feed into that because I believe in its value so strongly. What I hope not to do is to tell you, with anything I discuss, that there’s only one way to do it. There’s never just one way. And I hope never to make you feel that you need to do anything I talk about because that’s not for me to decide.
As my dad used to say, you don’t NEED anything to which my siblings and I would say, “well, we need to eat” and he would say “no, you could just starve.” Or , we’d say “you need to breathe” then he would say “no you could just asphyxiate”. Yeah, my dad was a bit severe at times but the point was important. People are always telling us what we need and we even tell ourselves in our own internal self talk that we need particular things but the fact is we don’t need any of those things, we simply want them or we want to avoid the alternative.
When making decisions about your art, whether it’s the medium you work in, the form you work in, the market you want to create for, where you want to sell it, if you want to sell it… You will find all kinds of advice about how to determine what is right for you and a lot of that will be steeped in “you need to do X in order to have Y.” When most of the time what you’re really being presented with is “if you do X, then Y is a potential outcome”, but it is neither the only outcome or a guaranteed outcome. So don’t fall for those kind of ultimatum statements.
If you want to create from an authentic place—and we’ll talk about why that in and of itself is important, in just a moment—you have to start by realizing you are the ultimate authority on what is right for you. You need to break out of the ideas that we’ve all been fed about what we should do, what success should look like and what particular accomplishments are going to make us happy. Because the fact is, there is no one measuring stick for success.
Success can be anything from you being happy with the work that you make, even though you show it to no one else, to you selling you work for loads of money. But both of those extremes are rarely going to be an authentic goal for any particular artist. And yet, we all think that we will have made it if we reach that second goal, selling our work for lots of money.
But how does money really measure success for an artist? I mean, who gets into art for the money? But isn’t it funny that there is this kind of supreme goal for artists, rooted in being successful on a monetary level? If you sell a lot of art for a lot of money then are you automatically successful? Absolutely not.
Sure, if you get to that point then you can pay your bills with your art, that’s a pretty nice accomplishment for a lot of artists. But making a lot of money isn’t, on it’s own, going to bring you happiness as an artist, or make you fulfilled, or feed your muse. I’m not say money can’t help, and if you’re truly excited to sell your work and you’re not able to get those sales you’re after, that can be pretty devastating. To me, though, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to put money at the forefront of measuring artistic success. I guess I find it hard to imagine how the authenticity from which you create art can be based in a desire to make money.
Your success in what you do is better measured, I think, by how happy you are in the work that you’re doing. And when I say the work, I mean the whole shebang. From creating to marketing to selling, true success can be measured by how well all those things are balanced so that you enjoy, overall, what you do.
It’s true that we’re unlikely to enjoy every aspect of being an artist, especially as a selling artist, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t love what you do. I don’t really like cleaning the house but I like a clean house because I love my home and I do those things I don’t like to do in order to support the things that you give me joy. And you do that with your art business, if you have a business. Or you spend hours completing those painstaking finishes on your work so it really shines, literally or figuratively, no matter how tedious they are. Or maybe you find a less tedious option you’re okay with I suppose. The point is, you do things you don’t want to do because it allows you to do what you love.
So what I’m hoping to accomplish this year with you is for all of us, myself included, to really dig down and figure out what it is that we want from creating art, starting with throwing out all the preconceived ideas we’ve been fed. I want to propose is that we use this concept of authenticity as a base from which to root our exploration of ourselves and what our individual, personal and very unique meaning of success is.
As I mentioned earlier, I was going to explain why creating from an authentic place is important. I put that off till now because the answer is really in what I just talked about. Authenticity is not just about creating with your own unique artistic voice, which I think is a misconception that many people have, but it’s about vigilance. Creating authentically means paying attention to your constantly changing and evolving world, your ever changing circumstances, and your constantly growing and changing self. It’s important to keep asking yourself “is this what I really want?” as you head off into opening a shop online or getting into doing wholesale shows or deciding to chase gallery representation or even just continuing to work with the same medium. Your art is not about how you get it out there or what materials you work wtih. Your art is about your curiosity and exploration. The artistic mind can express itself with whatever, whenever, wherever you are. So you should never feel completely boxed in by what you’re doing. If you do, asking that question, “Is this what I really want?” is a good place to start.
I’m not saying there aren’t concessions to be made as our preferred outcomes don’t always mesh with what we want to be working on. For instance you might have been creating and selling small low price point paintings or scupltures but now want to create big expensive pieces. If you’re in a position where you have to sell in order to fund your art, you might have to think in terms of going bigger in small increments, so you can get your market used to the change or have time to create a new or broader customer base. Or you may want to start working in metal jewelry but your creative space, which up to now has been all about beading , is in the corner of the family room your kids also play in so you choose not to work with caustic chemicals and dangerous sharp pointy things. Or whatever.
The purpose of working from an authentic place is not to simply chase some ideal of what you’d like to do and how you would like your art career and life to look like. I certainly think you should chase any dream you have, but creating from an authentic place is not as much about the dreams you have as being honest with yourself about what dreams will make you happy and fulfilled. And, understand, that authentic place is a big picture thing. You have whole big chunks of your life outside of your art bubble. You have family, friends, responsibilities, and other interests.
Creating from an authentic place is also important because it’s one of the only ways to find a place from where you can collectively support all aspects of your life. For instance, if you struggle finding the time to create and sell your work, maybe admitting to yourself that you don’t really want to have an art business, that you just think that’s what you’re supposed to do, will free you up. Then you can give the majority of your art allocated time over to the creative work itself, skipping the ongoing sales efforts and maybe just doing one show a year to cover your expenses, or handing the sales over to somebody else who might take half of the sales but at least you won’t be tied up with all that work. Then you should have the time and energy to focus on work that fulfills you creatively while still having time for your family, friends, and other interests.
It’s also vital to work from a place of authenticity because that’s the only way you’ll find your unique artistic voice or for your artistic voice to evolve in a meaningful way for you. As mentioned, authenticity takes vigilance and a willingness to frequently and honestly analyze yourself, your wants, and what we refer to as your needs — you know the things that support what you want like staying alive and being financially secure and such. Finding your unique artistic voice comes from the same self-evaluation and honesty as authenticity. I doubt you find that surprising but I hope you can see how this comes full circle. Find your authentic self and you’ll be able to better find or refine your unique artistic voice, and in the process you will come to better understand the kind of success that will make you feel fulfilled and rewarded.
So what I’d like to get you to start working on, even though I know it’s the holidays, is just thinking about what you really want in life, what you really want from your art. Start thinking about the times you were happiest in your artistic endeavors and why you sell or don’t sell or why you procrastinate and maybe don’t get as much work done as you’d like. There are a lot of things to uncover. This is why I think we can fill a year exploring all the ways that we can get rid of preconceived ideas and other people’s notion of success to define the kind of success that will make us truly happy and keep our muse curious and excited.
So, what you think? Does this sound like a good place to start in the new year? Has this conversation got those wheels turning trying to figure out that question from the beginning of this conversation “What drives your work and the direction of your artistic journey?”
I do hope this has got you thinking and that you’ll return to go on this journey with me. As part of this journey, I’d really love to hear from you. If the things I’m talking remind you of experiences you’ve had, if you’ve had some tremendous breakthroughs and epiphanies about what you’ve been doing with your artwork, I would love to help share your stories. You can send me your stories, thoughts, opinions, requests or whatever you want by email at theSagearts@gmail.com or you can go to the website at www.thesagearts.com Use the contact page there to write to me or click on the red button in the bottom right corner to leave me a voice message. You can also reach out to me on Facebook at facebook.com/theSageartspodcast, all one word or, the same thing on Instagram so Instagram.com/thesageartspodcast, all one word.
If you like what you’ve heard so far and want to help me with the expenses of putting on this podcast, I do have a Buy Me a Coffee page at buymeacoffee.com/thesagearts where you can make a one time contribution. I am working on a membership option and once that’s going it should show in your podcast player but I’ll also announce it on future episodes since it’ll include additional stuff like exclusive episodes and live chats. So that’s in the works.
I had wanted to stop and give a shout out to all the hundred plus people (Yes, I tried to make a list!) who have been encouraging me in this project, but since that would be an impossibly long part of this episode, let me just thank you all for your support and faith in me. Although I will tell you I am doing this to help you all out there, it really truly helps me figure out the same things I’m trying to help you with. Because this being an artist thing isn’t about reaching some ultimate goal of professionalism and know how, it’s an ongoing journey that, thankfully, wonderfully, never ends.
So, that’s it for this episode. I’m still trying to get these out twice a week until Christmas so I owe you at least two more before we hit the height of the holiday season. While I’m off doing that, I hope you give these ideas some thought and do reach out to me if you have want to share your ideas, stories, or opinions, or would like to even guest co-host. Again you can find all the ways to contact me at the website at www.thesagearts.com
So, enjoy your holiday festivities, be kind to each other, and keep feeding that muse of yours. I look forward to having you join me next time on the Sage arts podcast.
