I remember reading, many years ago – in my studio in West Norwood, about Nicholas Logsdail’s decision(?) to stop being a practicing artist and to concentrate on what today is called curating or being a gallerist. Should I follow in his footsteps before it’s too late to have any sort of career as a curator? As much as I tell myself to focus on my own practice I can’t help but do this through thinking about and organising group events and activities in which by dint of my being the project leader the work I present is almost always the poor relation and I am rarely satisfied with my contribution.
I am self-aware enough to recognise that I am not, and never will be, the greatest artist. I am starting to feel that I am barely an adequate artist.
Would my life be easier if I gave up the pretence? It would certainly be less frustrating and more economically viable. I could rent a room half the size of my studio as showroom come office …
At the same time I am not sure that I could deal with … accept … the inevitable sense of failure that I am bound to feel. I have persisted with my practice for thirty five years, so in some ways it feels dumb to stop now. Yet on the other hand it feels pointless carrying on when I think that it is unlikely that I will ever even be able to call myself an emerging artist. Emerging implies a definite sense of energy and evolution – a being on route to somewhere. It appears am not on route anywhere!
It really doesn’t matter whether my lack of artistic career is down to bad decisions or bad luck the outcome is the same – bad. Do I want to keep feeling this sense of disappointment and frustration?
Or do I gird my loins, put my money where my mouth is (or more accurately where it has been), and give being a visual artist my fullest attention – whatever that means. Go to the studio and make, and make, and make.
Could the art world 2038 be ready for a newly discovered 70 year old artist? That gives me nearly another fifteen years in which to make my mark. Recent events including the failure to get one of the artists’ working grants makes me wonder whether those years might be better spent somewhere else than Sweden. I am seriously considering that I will never fit in Sweden and therefore I have to ask if I can even survive there … let alone flourish.
I used to think that I was unappreciated and unsupported because I didn’t understand the system, now that I know the system far better I wonder if the system simply isn’t interested in appreciating and supporting artists like me. How long do I keep pushing against closed doors?
