Philthy Conversations with Artists

Okay, so I’ve been in this studio a total of 15 hours in the past 3 days and it isn’t even mine. But who doesn’t love to be in someone else’s studio, telling them how to sexify it? Together, Rick Wright (guy pointing at his photos) and I (chick below) have turned his work shed of a studio into a virtual salon.

Why? Besides the fact that it needed it, it was for Studio Tours, a yearly event put on by the Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA). Basically, Philadelphia artists open their studios for one weekend and anyone can come by, check out their art, drink some wine (we have pumpkin ale and donuts, but that’s just us) and artists can sell some work.

In return for the promotion of this event, artists donate a work to the CFEVA, which is then auctioned off to support the organization. It’s a good idea, a mutual support. The artists get some exposure and the center makes some money so that it can continue helping emerging artists. There is so much in this world…created needs in which something terrible keeps the another terrible thing alive and vice versa, that it makes me happy when symbiotic relationships keep two wonderful things alive.

So…what’s been going on?

The table here is laden with sign-up sheets for Rick’s mail list and online classes, his books and some Halloween candy. I’ve Halloweened this place up, and believe me, it’s helped. Yesterday, people came in and socialized and smiled and bought things. It was, in a word…lovely.

Today is a little slower. I’m sitting on this orange couch with the northern light shifting in on this quiet Sunday. I can’t really blame people…Sundays I want to stay home, too. And it’s nice to just sit here and think about this space, this white room full of Rick’s photos and photo equipment, his computer and rolling chairs.

I need this moment to stop and say hi to the Philthy Art readers and to return to this project and it’s roots. The last months have seen Mister Misses’ letters from Paris and a plug for a local opening here and there. My relationship to the artistic projects around me has become more peripheral, as I’ve been focusing on my own long-term project of writing a novel.

I’ve been attending openings with Rick, and I have to say that it gets less and less sexy with time. I can remember a time when an art opening and some cheap red wine could transcend every mundane feeling I’d had for three weeks. It’s getting harder, the more I see behind the scenes of money and movement and the ambiguity of success.

It becomes more and more evident that as an artist, a writer, a musician, the public acknowledgment of your work is a deliverance that does not deliver. Selling a couple pieces might help you pay bills, but being or becoming a name isn’t the promised land it seems to be from the outside. From the inside, it is still little you, days etched with demands on your time and higher stakes. Your choices weight heavier and that sense of being we hope for remains just beyond the fray.

Maybe it’s obvious to you, but it still surprises me that following your bliss isn’t always blissful. And that our demons will follow us, even as we find ways to be heard and seen in the ways we’ve dreamed. I see Rick work 80 hour weeks, stress over prints owed to galleries, online classes, and all the while keeping his eyes open to the world to try to find his pictures.

I see myself wake up with the same dread before a day of working on my novel as I do before a day of office temp work. But if you’re an anxious person, you will be anxious behind a desk, in a quarry, or in your art studio.

But wouldn’t you rather be an art studio? Or writing your novel?

I would.