It’s been an intense time in my household. Rob has been photographing our peonies and I’ve been photographing him at work. I’ve been documenting the garden, documenting his finished paintings, updating his website and social media. Making reels. Honestly, it’s all very fun. But we’ve been also a bit at the mercy of the weather — will the blooms last the various heatwaves and storms? Will there be sun enough for making the photographs Rob likes to make? He takes his own photos for his painting references and I take mine. One hopes the blooms are at the correct moment of opening for his purposes at the same time as the light swings in through one window or another. It’s a flurry, a bit of delightful chaos. And then that part is done. But there’s always so many more things to do.

On a more practical side of things: did you know that when you list the price of a painting on social media, it is dramatically more likely to sell? But the other thing is that when you sell through a gallery, because it’s retail of course, they take half. Fair enough. So sometimes I’ve had people add up the dollars and say wow you must be rich, lol. So fun fact: we are absolutely not even close to being rich :) I mean, rich in art, and living the art life, resounding YES. But dollar dollar rich no. And meanwhile I’ve recently been rejected for two grants, I mean NBD, the usual, but. Might have to walk down to the Sev one day this week and buy myself a lottery ticket. I mention all this because this is also “living like an artist.” It’s the art-life baby. Not all romantic drooping peonies and cute instagram reels.

I want to talk about inspiration, uplifting each other, community. Yes, I suck at this right now. though I do have my small community of folks who have honestly been uplifting me, at a time when I’ve not felt all that able to do the uplifting for others as much as I’d wish. I’m a big old downer of late. Nevertheless, she persists. A few years (?) ago now, for a work team building bulletin board at the day job I made a poster that said:

uPLiFT — you can’t spell uplift without u and i

I mean, I thought it was clever. Maybe someone else has also mentioned this — I googled and found the same thing with the word “community,” but not “uplift.” So that’s also fine.

Today I wanted to share a few quotations from a book of interviews titled, Listening by Jonathan Cott. He interviews Fellini who says:

“A creative person — let’s say that awful word: an artist — makes what we call magical operations.”

And later, Bob Dylan:

“The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do. What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?”

And then Cott himself says:

“Someone once said that a masterpiece’s function is to create energy for other people to create other masterpieces.”

Back to Dylan: “weirdness is exactness.”

All to say, be weird, be exact, make your masterpieces, create good energy, inspire, uplift, conduct your magical weird operations, you know? Because maybe that is doing one other person some good in this world. And maybe these days that’s an awful lot. It’s dearly needed. Maybe your masterpiece will sink without much fanfare, but maybe one other person will find it to be the wind in their sails. That’s not nothing.

July 16, 2024