The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Most of us artists are too sensitive for this world. We’re delicate flowers, blooming nocturnally, our precious scent wafting on the tidal emanations of the moon and lost before dawn. By day we’re ambivalent about our talents. We torture ourselves with questions of skill and worse, of imagination, wondering if we made a mistake pursuing a trade whose rewards are certainly not monetary in a society that judges us by our profit and loss. In daylight we dance with our demons. By nightfall we listen to bacchanalian howls echoing from ravines back in our suspect imaginations.

We are our worst critics. We are our biggest admirers. The push and pull could drive an ordinary person crazy. It certainly does us. Caught between that spark of creativity and the dark shadow it costs, we are trapped between the jitterbug and the dirge, yo-yos to our own ambivalence, see-sawing away until paralysis or delirium gets a grip on our inner child, the spoiled brat who craves attention but wilts under criticism.

And god help us if we find ourselves suddenly ‘marketable’. Try a new style, a variation, an experimental approach, but the buying public may only want that last painting, the hit song, the first novel. The pressure will be to replicate, to plagiarize ourselves, to stay with the tried and true and tired. The saleable. Even the Masters sold out. Dali signing thousands of prints, Picasso scribbling iconic doodles, the spark slowly dying while the money rolls in. It’s a trap, a curse, a blessing, a living. A starving artist, and you can quote me, is a far better artist than a famous ones in their old age, nine times out of ten. The trouble is, eight of them will just give up.

What I tell the kids I sometimes inflict my wisdom on is this: get a part-time job to pay the rent, don’t buy a new car, live frugally, do NOT go into debt. And above all else, keep making art whether it sells or not. And if it sells, keep pushing your limit. Keep experimenting. And whatever you do, don’t amputate ears or other body parts. It’s only art, not life and death. Or you can do what I do and tell yourself every damn day, it beats working for a living….

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