This Substack Is Called An American Artist. Part One: Artist
Where I explore that age-old question, “What is an artist?” through a reluctant telling of my own story.
Introduction
One of my motivations with this Substack account is to offer up my ruminations on what it means to be an artist in this country, the United States of America; hence the title of this post. And over the course of two or three posts, I’d like to address the topic head-on. Why do I accept the mantle of an American artist? And why do I feel the need to express that? The problem is that both of these cultural identifiers—artist and American—are highly problematic in ways that make it exasperating to use them with any thoughtfulness. Both terms, it seems, are perennially overused, to the point of emptying the words of meaning. And even when the words are meaningfully applied, there is usually an underlying motive or agenda implied, as if they were brands in a sales pitch or spoken of with the empty platitudes of boosterism. So, because they are problematic in their application, I feel a need to explain why on earth I would take them on as a frank description of who I am.
As you’d expect, the individual complications of these terms are compounded when used together, as when I identify myself as an American artist, so I’ve chosen to write about them separately. And my hope is that, when I’ve completed both articles, each can act as a lens to see the other in a particular light.
This first post will be about identifying as an artist, and the follow-up post will be about identifying as an American. And don’t hold your breath for the next post since I acknowledge that it's a difficult subject for an artist to confront in any era and especially so in our present-day fraught political atmosphere. But I will publish something so I can find my own peace of mind amid the chaos, and what better time to tackle demons?
Speaking as an Artist
Does that heading sound a tad pretentious? I just now wrote that subheading sincerely, but when I read it back to myself, it does sound a bit off. But that, in itself, is one of the topics I want to address in this post: the awkwardness and embedded pretense of speaking of oneself as an artist.
Identity as What You Do
Upon first meeting someone in a casual setting, as you introduce yourselves, there’s the natural conversational question, “What do you do?” Most folks will tell you what they do to earn money—their professional occupation—which makes perfect sense as it is probably where they spend most of their active time. Yet, it’s probably a physical fact that the one activity we spend the most time on over the course of our lives is sleeping. But to identify as a sleeper would come off as weird and set you apart as a bit strange. Dreamer could work as an occupation, though that would sound even more pretentious than saying you were an artist. I’m toying with this absurd analogy to underscore the importance we place on what we intentionally do with our lives, not what we spend most of our time doing, though the two often coincide. How we direct our lives largely determines how we identify ourselves. Most of the time, a question of “What do you do?” is simply just a conversational icebreaker, which is why I typically opt for, “I have a boring day job,” or, depending on the context, I might add, “I’m a musician.” But if I sense that the other person may be genuinely interested and not just making small talk, I will always reply, “I’m a visual artist.” Unfortunately, the answer of artist usually goes over like a lead balloon, deflating the conversation or, at a minimum, evoking a feigned interest. And in my case, to create more discomfort, they’ll ask something like, “What kind of art? Are you a painter?” Then, I’m left with having to describe my work in a way that a total stranger might minimally comprehend. I still haven’t come up with a satisfactorily succinct description that most folks could grasp, but that’s getting a little off-topic.
I recently entered into one of these “What do you do?” exchanges, and to my relief, my new acquaintance diffused the awkwardness and conveyed a lighter tone when he confessed that he didn’t have an artistic bone in his body. As we talked, I got to tell my childhood anecdote of my first understanding that I might be an artist after suddenly realizing that my peers lacked my visual observation and knack for drawing. The younger me assumed that everybody could draw a recognizable version of a thing until I looked around at my fellow first grader’s drawings and was dumbfounded.
An Artist Since Childhood?
This childhood reminiscence is actually one of my benchmarks for identifying as an artist. For sure, many parents look at their child’s drawing and, if only to encourage their creative expression, tell them that they are an artist. And it’s obviously said to encourage the child’s creative thinking. Certainly, they are not telling their kid that when they grow up they will get no respect, probably be perennially depressed, lack social skills, and subsist on a poverty income for their entire life. When I think back on my childhood, I do recall I might have had some prodigal skills in graphic representation. I also remember having creative ideas to which most of my childhood friends appeared clueless when I tried to engage them. And, with a few notable exceptions, those other kids didn’t come close to matching my imaginative thoughts. Contrary to what you might expect, I do not recollect anyone ever saying that I was an artist because of these traits.
The biographical foundation for calling myself an artist grew from simple encouragement from my parents, who recognized my creative skills and set an example with their own craft-oriented activities. Being in a public school system that encouraged drawing and painting, and having parents who made our Christmas tree ornaments, for instance, I learned by osmosis that creating is just something people do, and I was always creating things. It also probably helped that I didn’t have parents who forcibly steered their children toward particular professional occupations or the family business. But neither did they encourage my creative skills as a potential adult occupation; they were likely unaware of that possibility.
A Brief Statement of Why I Don’t Like My Biography
I want this post to be about how we apply the identifier artist to specific people. But I’m realizing some things as I write this. One is that the concept of artist is too large a subject matter for me to touch upon without going off on a tangent into the encompassing factors of culture, economics, and psychology. That is to say, in every social science, there’s likely no shortage of arguments as to what an artist is or isn't. The other thing that I didn’t anticipate was having to get past my reluctance to talk about myself, because what better way to speak about identifying as an artist than by using myself—the artist—as a prime example? Part of my reluctance to reveal my biographical information is that I don’t want it to be used as a lens through which to view my artwork. Stories of my life will not give you any insight into my artwork. Full stop. The problem with me—an artist whose work doesn’t intentionally reflect the self of the artist—writing about the identifier artist is that I am an outlier when it comes to biography showing up in one’s art. So, this sidebar statement with my take on biography is kind of an important thing to get across, since much fine art gets interpreted through the life of the artist, and many fine artists use their life experiences as a primary source for their art. As you’ll see in my conclusion, I’m not trying to make an umbrella statement about the identity of all artists. My goal with this article is not to explain the artist but to be one, reflecting on his identity.
Becoming an Artist
I confess to having never entered a museum or art gallery until I found myself as a young adult in Europe, where the first art museum I ever stepped into happened to be he Louvre. This event was shortly followed by an enthusiastic deep dive into art history, which I was also never previously schooled in. Over the next two years, I returned to the Louvre and made several repeat visits to the Alte Pinakothek and the Neue Pinakothek. While in these art museums’ home city of Munich, I also discovered the Lenbachhaus, a museum that arose from the residence of the Expressionist group of artists known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). This group included seminal artists Franz Marc, Gabriella Mũnter, Wassily Kandinsky, and a handful of lesser-known artists. For probably the first time, I identified with others—with this group of artists. They were a band of outsiders with the common bond of giving their lives over entirely to their creative imaginations. That’s all I wanted from life, then and still.1
Anyone who wants to call themself a visual artist has to face a number of cultural hurdles—institutional acceptance, pressures of a work ethic, and self-critical psychological barriers like impostor syndrome and “blank canvas,” the visual artist’s equivalent of writer’s block. Such factors affect an artist and can sometimes be defining characteristics or, conversely, have little effect at all. Let’s look at one of these impediments toward artistic identification—the expectation of production. To claim you are an artist means that you need to be continually making art, and preferably lots of it. For some artists with enthusiasm and energy, this is no problem, and they just naturally work, almost compulsively. But with any identity, there’s an unwritten rule that if you are not actively working at it, you can’t really claim it, and this stems in part from the so-called Protestant work ethic, where hard work and diligence are the foremost defining characteristics. There’s a general feeling among artists that we are less authentic when we are not producing work with regularity. This is why I call it a cultural hurdle because it’s not a true factor for identifying as an artist but rather an expectation imposed upon us. One of the benefits of the multiplicity of definitions of artist is that we can more or less craft our own way of being an artist, and we can choose to take on our own set of defining characteristics. I just wanted to point out here that these outside influences are strong, and we risk being judged if we do not abide by them. Holding an awareness of the power of those benchmarks is itself part of what an artist takes on in proclaiming identification as such.
Identity: Artist
Artist as identity is not akin to a professional occupation, and, as I mentioned above, the work we do is the most common way of specifying a general identification of ourself. The artists I know call themselves such, not to identify their occupation—in fact, only a few of my friends earn a regular income that way—but because making art—and thinking about making art—occupies their core life. An artist is someone whose life is dedicated to their art; all else is on the periphery of that focus. Art is a calling rather than an occupation. That’s probably why it’s awkward to bring this up in casual conversation, rather like asking someone with a religious vocation what they do. Frivolous social niceties don’t typically know what to do with callings, since discussing that type of identity can get too serious too quickly. And unless you are meeting someone of your faith, it raises a barrier.
As I suggested above, for every artist there appears to be a unique, self-made definition as to what that means. This is further compounded—or perhaps caused—by the multiplicity of definitions of what art itself is. Identifying oneself as an artist will always be complicated in our pluralist world, where artist can imply a wide spectrum of activities and consequently be used to describe a wide swath of creative people—which is why I always say I’m specifically a visual artist.
The definition of artist is by its nature problematic, and we’ve struggled since ancient times with definitions of that role. Consequently, identifying as an artist is equally complicated, and it’s too easy to opt for the relativistic tendency to just say that for every artist there is a unique definition of artist, which has some truth to it. But the defining characteristics I identify with are summed up in the idea of the artist as a seeker playfully bearing gifts.
Afterword
As I mention in the introduction, this is the first part of my dissection of my Substack title, An American Artist. In a future installment, I will take these ideas of what being an artist is and place them in the context of a pluralistic, late-modern, capitalist society with culturally conservative leanings but with a modicum of liberal arts opportunities—that is to say, in these United States of America.