I have two art shows coming up and yet I feel like a failure. Not good enough, not good enough... It's my family's fault for not understanding anything about the reality of the art community. All they know is stereotypes they've learned from movies. My sister in law is barely 21, going to school to be an accountant. What does she know? And yet she has this way of making me feel like being in the same ROOM as art makes me a failure. Because a REAL job happens from 9 to 5 and must involve a cubicle of some sort.
My mother's expectations on the other hand are SO low, it makes me wonder if she thinks I am incapable, or if she just doesn't like seeing me accomplish more than she was able to. She doesn't know who bloody Georgia O'Keefe is. I almost cried. She thinks Thomas Kinkade is an artist and that real art is bought in shopping malls. She thinks I'm not ambitious enough because I do art shows and have been working on paintings for a gallery when she thinks I should just sell prints at festivals. ! Now don't get me wrong, I love festivals, but my goal is not to be a traveling salesman, my goal is to be an artist with some self respect and legitimacy.
Then there's my older Soviet audience who of course doesn't understand anything other than classical Russian landscape art. I'm not accusing them of being simpletons, it's just that everything else is foreign to them. They don't have art degrees and it's not as if they could help being sheltered behind the red curtain. So I grin and bear their ignorance when they tell me that in THEIR country there was a proper way to paint. I tried to teach them about Vasily Kandinsky, Komar and Melamid, Chagall, and others, but they blew them off as crazy contemporary artists. When I informed them that most of these artists are old, quite well known, and have been dead for half a century, they still brushed them off as beginners. Do you have any idea how frustrating this is to someone who majored in art history?
Luckily I'm beginning to connect with other working artists which is such a blessing! But even with their support, they are outnumbered by those in my life who live on a completely different plane, content being miserable because it's what they were told to do. Is this why they try to make me feel like my existence is worthless? Because they are unhappy following someone else's orders, pushing papers, and following in the path of the majority? Because I sure never told them to neglect their souls.
But I don't have time to argue. I have a lot of work to do and tea in two weeks with four artists, a show in about a month and another collaborative show in December. Deadlines don't care what my mother in law thinks. It's too late to tell me I wasted my life now. Speaking of which, I think that painting I abandoned in order to write this is just about dry. Time to get back to work.
1:02 a.m. - 2006-05-12