🧑🎨 Art is my life. I love making it. I love talking about it. I love not shutting up about it! I love talking about it right now.
🫱🏾🫲🏼 I've had the fortune to work with other artists. The things they make spark such joy!
Over my long and storied career, I've crossed path with people who just stop making art. For some, the hassle of working in the commercial space was too much. That's a tragedy of capitalism.
😑 For others, there were other things they would rather do than make art. If they had the opportunity to do two things, and one was not art, they would choose the activity that wasn't art. I don't want to say that's "strange", it's pretty common for people to enjoy some things over others. It's certainly not me.
🙁 I come across posts in social media, or messages sent directly to me, where someone laments that they haven't been making art. They want to want to make art, but they don't want to make art. Certainly they don't want to make art more than they want to do other things.
🧑⚕️ From an armchair-psychologist perspective, one might diagnose that maybe this other person is "depressed" and they really do want to make art, but fear or anxiety prevents them from doing so. But no, art is work. It's not weird for someone to want to watch a movie or to play a game or (gasp!) spend time with their loved ones, rather than grind out some material set to a rigorous and arbitrary standards of aesthetics, using complex tools and concentrated skills.
🤷 I don't know how to reply to a person who is grousing that they lack motivation to make art. It's not bad to not make art. (I don't like to say that it's a shame that they don't make art. Art isn't inevitable; that's a big part of what makes it so great.) I would feel bad giving someone a pep talk towards making them do something that, while it's something they might be good at, it's not something they really want to do.
🕵️ Often I'm going through my social media, and I'm wondering what happened to some of these people who don't post any more. Sometimes they just moved to another account and didn't tell anyone, or even just became inactive on the Internet all together. I hope they're okay. I would hope that maybe they still make art, they just don't feel compelled to share it with the digital soup. Or maybe they don't want to make art any more, and that's okay, too. I will miss it, but I've been told repeatedly that I am not both the alpha and the omega, and as an adult I should respect that.
🙂 If I could wave my magic wand, I'd make everything all right. I hope that whatever you're doing, you still find happiness in this world. Enjoy the present while we hope for the future.