Artist at work
August 23 2010
Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.- Philip Roth, Everyman
The Pianobabbler is on vacation. The Pianobabbler is at work.
Vacation. Work. Different words, same referent.
Artists will grasp this instantly: behind the glamorized, rhapsodized, romanticized, idealized mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey glazed-eyed images civilians have of la vie d'artiste lies a proletarian engine room, roiling with the coal dust, furrow grime and furnace soot of the creative enterprise.
Art. Is. work.
Professional artists live encased in a bubble. Or a bubble lives within us. A bubble of impulses, intuitions and ideas on which we are compelled to act. We know no respite from it.
A banshee melody fragment. A persisting rhythm.
Fear of losing creativity. Guilt over not using it.
Producing to the exclusion of everything. Living to the exclusion of producing.
The artist's struggle.
When the Pianobabbler composes a new song, most often he will do so nowhere near piano. My tune Allelujah, for example. I carried its primal fragments in my head for days and days. They blew around my brain like withered scraps in a windy yard. They blared when I slept. Distracted me from duties.
Finally, my mind's tweezers plucked the notes from the inner soundscape. I lay them down in painstaking sequence on the page. Behold, a song. Of which I am proud. About which, art-that-conceals-art, few would suspect I underwent such a long shvitz.
The artist trucks in enjoyment, but does not toil in it.
Our wares induce pleasure in the buyer, but not necessarily in the manufacturer.
Do not think I'm complaining. Pleasure there is, and the pleasure of working as an artist lies precisely in the work. Pleasure deprivation enhances achievement. We're all about the achievement.
Add to this the pleasure of performing. With great respect to Glenn "audiences are a force of evil" Gould, the audience is almost always divine. Divine and desired and indispensable.
Why?
Because we can only have one reason for becoming working artists: connection with others. It would have no meaning or sense to sign your name to your work, if it were not for others to read. We transmit our art on the knowledge that a receiver lies at the other end.
Philip Roth got it right. Art is a slog. Thank goodness.
I now return to my vacation. Relaxing. Resting. I have this new tune running in my head…
The Pianobabbler has babbled.
The Pianobabbler is a RonDavisMusic production. The Pianobabbler's blog posts appear weekly at pianobabbler.com. Please remember to leave your comments and thoughts below. Subscribe to the RSS feed. And subscribe to RonDavisNews by clicking on the link, above right. And follow us on Twitter.
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