I'm thinking of the grungy tagger scooped up in sudden success because some hawk-eyed dealer found a gritty, lean, raw talent they knew they could market well. Presto, some schmoe is no longer struggling, suddenly has cash and legions of fawning, flakey fans. The exposed nerves of his past can't stand the sudden shock of the cool air of fame on a cheese-grater raw psyche. And he melts down. A few months later he's dead. He kills the pain of lost autonomy and vacuous sycophancy by self immolating in a drugged flame-out. Like a crisping Saigon monk. But, oh, a perfect art marketing legend of found and lost genius. So brilliant. So tragic. So lucrative. But finally to the market so yesterday.
And "child artists," some just precocious nymphs with sly parents, some perhaps potentially brilliant - or might have been someday - whose development becomes fossilized, frozen in an amber of preternatural, endless childhood. Promoted in a bizarre spectacle of smarmy opportunists and studio parents marketing their work as "mature and masterful" at the age of eight or ten or twelve. Whatever depth of soul and spirit their precociousness may have matured into trapped forever in pubescent superficiality. Their true potential shrink-wrapped beneath their "look," their "style" and spit out as $25,000.00 copier machine prints (prices for original works available on request post approval).
Michaelangelo's adolescent knock off of "The Torment of St Anthony" was not a marvel because he painted it when he was twelve or so, "The Torment of St Anthony" is a marvel because of what he painted and sculpted later throughout his adult life. He was made truly brilliant by the grinding and polishing effect of torment, of politics and fear, guilt, remorse, passion, rich delight, hopeless love, months issolated and hidden from assasination in a single room basement chamber after a failed rebellion. "The most massive characters are seared with scars" said Gibran. The floods of his adulthood inundated the cleverness of his boyhood laying down deep, rich loam out of which grew expressions of universality and glory. His richness and density of spirit as a mature artist is what makes his boyishly clever knock-off so important, not the reverse.
When I was a young man I drank and drugged myself with everything there was to use. I was afraid I couldn't be the artist I needed myself to be, to live doing what I knew I loved. To risk being rejected by your deepest, truest love and passion is a terrifying thing to confront. For a long time I was more willing to live in oblivion and poison myself to death than risk the possibility I couldn't be the artist I wanted to be. I guess one day I grew the balls to realize that I'd rather find myself at the end of my life an honestly rejected suitor than to piss my life away in fear of even trying.
I'll never have children. I'll never spin the genetic thread that I can pretend will make some thing of me live past my death. After I'm gone nothing will be left of me but my paintings. I have no legacy but them. Like anyone with children I want them to be safe and go on after I'm dead. And, like children I fret and dread their future and I hope. But, like most artists - I can't know, can't know if both I and my work will be forgotten a month after I'm compost.
Somedays I think I am the luckiest man alive. Other days I'm drowning, afraid again. But, I'm an artist, for better or worse, I am an artist. Whatever gatekeeper I hid from drunk and wasted didn't turn me back. Maybe art, the lover I was afraid would reject me, will never embrace me with the same aching passion I have I have for her, but I haven't been sent away either.
All I can do is paint. All I have is being an artist.
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