On artists suffering for their art

I’m pretty confident that the person who came up with the expression never fully understood the subtle interplay between the pain and discomfort of, say, a prostate infection, and the creation of art. In my sample1ew of one, suffering does not lead to art, it leads to wanting the suffering to stop. I could draw a big happy face right now, then splatter it with Jackson Pollock-style blobs of colour, and it would not make my prostate infection go away.

If it could make my prostate infection go away, I’d be up to my pits in art as I typed this. I’d be typing from on top of my giant pile of art.

Instead, I’ve been taking antibiotics and resting. Neither of these produces art, but they ease my suffering.

When the suffering ends, I will draw a Gum Gum Person.

The Unfinished Tree: A masterpiece (except for the masterpiece part)

Occasionally I get the urge to indulge the drawing ‘n painting artistic side of me and the results are usually halting, uninspired and incomplete. And here’s one of them!

The Unfinished Tree
The Unfinished Tree (rejected U2 album, 1987)

This is based on a photograph I found by cleverly doing an image search on the phrase ‘spooky tree’ in Google. The original:

As you can see my early rendering has captured none of the original spookiness and the tree exists in an existential white void, without bound, without limit, without me being arsed to finish the dang thing. Mostly it was an excuse to break out my digital tools and see how I fared with them. I used the Bamboo Fun tablet and Corel’s Painter Essentials 4, a cut-down version of their pricey Painter program. I could see myself getting some traction with this combo if I devoted enough time to it but the chances of me carving out that sort of time is pretty small these days.

Still, I was at least inspired to create a new category of post for this (Creative) so that’s something. I promise to maybe finish you someday, would-be spooky tree.