I read a great article by Amie Mcnee who is talking about things that I am always writing about on the Touchonian. I left a comment on her article that is the seed for this article.
Masters of Perception
There is something young artists rarely understand when first stepping into the creative life. It is not enough to make the work. You must also learn how to protect the conditions under which the work can be made.
When I was in my twenties, long before I had any real success as an artist, I recognized something important. Society becomes nervous around people whose lives do not conform to familiar patterns. If people cannot easily categorize what you are doing, they begin asking questions. If your daily life does not resemble what they recognize as normal productive behavior, they unconsciously begin applying pressure.
So I made a decision.
I decided to manage perception.
I set up a studio and from that moment forward I treated my artistic life exactly as though I were employed in a conventional profession. Every morning I went to work. I left the house with purpose. I arrived at my studio - sometimes a back room, sometimes an old garage at the back of the property, sometimes room an old farm house someone let me use or an old pump house that I converted to a studio, or a basement, sometimes just a nail on the wall to hang a canvas on or a kitchen table for making collages. I remained unavailable during normal working hours.
As far as the world was concerned, I had a job.
If someone asked what I was doing, I simply said, “I’m working.”
Sometimes people would ask, “Working on what?”
I would answer, “I’m building your future. Somebody has to do it.”
Naturally this confused people.
“What do you mean?”
I would say, “Look around you. You live in a world created by people from the past who were designing this future. I am one of those people designing the next future.”
The beauty of this strategy was that people stopped interfering.
If someone asked me to help them move furniture or run errands during the middle of the day, I answered exactly as any working professional would answer.
“Sure. I usually get off at five, although sometimes I have to work overtime. I’ll let you know.”
And that was enough.
People respected what they believed they understood.
At the time I supported myself partly as a painting contractor, which helped reinforce the illusion. Nobody really knew what I was doing all day, but they saw work clothes, tools, signs of industry. The appearance of productive labor is often more important to people than understanding what kind of labor it is.
This taught me something important about the creative life.
Artists are not only makers of objects. We are architects of perception.
To survive as an artist often requires creating protective boundaries around your life. Sometimes this means learning to become invisible. Sometimes it means refusing to over explain yourself. Sometimes it means allowing others to believe what makes them comfortable enough to leave you alone.
Mystics have understood this for centuries.
They move through the world quietly, blending in, wearing ordinary clothes, carrying ordinary responsibilities while protecting an inner life that others neither understand nor need to understand.
Most people, whether they realize it or not, organize their lives around one central aspiration.
They want to be seen by others as normal.
Artists live differently.
We are serial creators. We build futures that others cannot yet recognize. We spend our lives bringing into existence things whose value may not become visible until much later.
In a strange way, artists are masters of perception management.
We understand better than most that human reality itself is partly constructed through belief, expectation, assumption and social agreement.
Sometimes protecting your creative life is less about making art and more about carefully designing the conditions that allow the art to continue.
The work is not only the art.
The work is building the life that makes the art possible.
Another beautiful essay. I've never had to face that uncomfortable or awkward feeling of having to explain why or what I do to fit someone's idea of what I should be doing. I've just done/made/created my art fairly confidently. Yet it was the rest of my life that had me have all sorts of insecurities about how I thought people may have perceived me as if it mattered. And thankfully, all that dissipated as I got older/wiser. I don't hesitate when I'm working on a piece of my art what someone may think or get offended as it's all in the eyes of the beholder and they'll see what they want to see anyway. Long ago when I had a show somewhere that was not the gallery I normally showed at, a woman got offended by a piece of mine and assumed it was about abuse. She was relating it to her own experiences. She tried to have it removed and thankfully the director of this place gently read her the riot act to a) not touch the art and b) not to assume what a piece truly was about. A side note, the piece had NOTHING to do with abuse but guess that's a moot point.
This past winter I realized one of my primary issues transitioning from consultant to artist & therapeutic arts facilitator was retraining my brain about “work”. I decided to change my pattern: instead of starting my workday in the office on the computer, I began starting my day in the studio & working until lunch. Now I have organized my week so I am only in the office, having meetings, coaching or doing sessions on Tuesdays & Wednesdays. And I’m pretty strict about that. But it took a few months to change my own perception.