THE SNOWBALL EFFECT
A BRIEF MEDITATION ON DEVOTION IN MOTION, AND AN ARTIST’S DECLARATION OF SELF
Here’s one thing I know, and have known in my bones for as long as I can remember.
If you devote your life to creative work, and keep working it, and NEVER GIVE UP, there's a potential snowball effect. At a certain point, the sheer dint of lifelong effort rolls all those things you've spent your whole life pushing up the hill to the peak, over the top, and DOWNHILL, with gravity once and for all on your side.
That's how I feel right now, 66 years in. With some dreams paid out well behind me. And other ones just steamrolling down the other side of the hill at last.
Bottom line: I'm a creative artist. That's what I do. That's who I am. Whether I'm a good one or a bad one is not for me to say.
But I'm a REAL one. Whether you like what I do or not, I have entirely devoted my life to doing and being that fucking thing. I will go to my grave as a fucking artist. And when I die, I will doubtless come back as ANOTHER fucking artist.
The great subversive painter Robt. Williams says, "I will probably die of exposure to paints and chemicals. You can't BE more of a fucking artist than that!"
I guess my point is that there's no substitute for devotion to the craft, and your own connection to it. Your ideas. Your strategies for enacting them. How you spend every day figuring out how to make it work. And then making it work. Rolling that fucker uphill. Defying gravity and every other force of nature against you.
If you do all that, you just might have a shot of making something other people care as much about as you do.
And that's where the art hits the fan.