TO HARVEY AND THE OTHERS

Lately I been talking to a young man who was referred to me for mentoring. He is determined to be an artist. We exchange e-mails and chat about the nature of art, about the business of art, online critiques and such. And like so many young and hopeful souls he thinks being an artist must be such a cool lifestyle. He has romantic fantasies of a life without alarm clocks and deadlines, lounging around thinking cool, arty thoughts with cool arty people while waiting for some magical cloud of inspiration to envelope him, like Zeus embracing a new lover disguised as a fog of bliss.

Well, like they say in the musical "That aint it kid, that aint it!"

Inspiration of that sort is a myth. Art is a job. It's a wonderful job, but a job. You get up, you get to the studio and you make art. Dealers push for faster production, galleries ask for enough work for a solo exhibition with six weeks notice, commission deadlines press, charities "hate to ask, but can we have something next week." And the only fog that envelops artists is the same blizzard of envelopes full of bills that everyone everywhere has to plow their way through every month.

I find inspiration, it doesn't find me. I find it in the work-lives of other artists and other masters of their craft and plain folk I've known or see each day. I find it in the old, bent Vietnamese woman who never rides, but daily pushes her ancient bicycle through my neighborhood once west, once east. I take it from a dear friend whose politics, I tease, are sometimes woefully in error but whose goodness and devotion are boundless, who works herself to sickness on behalf of strangers. I take inspiration from a brilliant writer and actor who showed so much of himself, exposed so much of his truth and life that there was finally no possibility of hiding. He was either going to be recognized as an embarrassing fool or embraced as a speaker of depth and honesty, as a genius capering on the razor's edge of human folly and glory. Naturally his work earned the later response. I say it is natural that he was lauded because I believe absolutely in the urgent desire, the insistent hunger of men and women of thought to invariably embrace truth. Whether a truth of thorns and knife-edged broken mirror or of joy and bliss or of silent contemplation, truth in the arts is the hallmark of great work. And sometimes sooner, sometimes later it will always, finally be recognized.

Inspiration is not a drifting cloud or an arbitrary gift. Contrary to Hesiod's devotion it is not a visit from a muse that inspires and fires. Inspiration is searched out, gathered, it is single seeds gleaned from barren stubble fields of experience. Inspiration is the act of bearing witness to the spine and guts of other's who have gone before. It is the willingness to struggle, pleading with paints, or bronze or clay or words and chords until they are coaxed to their highest expression.

I keep a list of people - some famous, some not. I want to show them my work before I die. Not because my work is too wonderful for them to miss seeing, but because their work, their lives and their effect upon me has given me stores of inspiration that continually fuel my days and fire my passion. They inspire me to learn be as boldly honest as they are.

My studio walls are covered with beautiful twigs, sage bundles, strings, interesting crumpled wrappers and threading among them all are scribbled bits of Joni Mitchell's piercingly brilliant turns of phrase. "Now the janitors of Shadowland flick their brooms at me." "Evil is sweet in the mouth."

I love reading and re-reading Chiam Potok's "My Name is Asher Lev." It is a stunningly authentic work by an artist of words about the nature of a young man becoming an artist of imagery. But, what is most impressive to me is the clean, liquid translucency of Potok's prose. There is not a single line that should've been more or less than it is. The flow of the book is maintained by an absolute invisibility of language. Nothing Potok writes gets in the way of the story of Asher Lev. It is without ego and there is nothing of Potok to stumble over. It seems to have been so effortlessly written which suggests to me endless hours of work, of a painful, constant tearing apart and rebuilding of sentences and passages over and over until, finally, there was nothing left of Potok, only the story of Asher Lev remained. It is not the story of Asher that is inspiring to me. The huge struggle of Potok to remove himself from the story is epically inspiring.

Believing a magical cloud of inspiration must first fall upon one to make art is no different than thinking elves can fill the studio in midnight darkness to weave gold into your art. Gather it.