A chilling internal monologue as Sarah
Laing gives us a peek behind the curtain and lets us watch as she is browbeaten by a disembodied Katherine Mansfield, who is
not only utterly dismissive of her talent but surprisingly au courant about the
artists who could – any of them -- do a much better job.
(I usually only feature the first panel of Sarah's blog here, but it wouldn't have been coherent. Still, there is more to this and you should read the whole thing.)
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be an artist, this may help dispel the notion of tripping through the daisies and get you a little closer to the whole cutting-off-your-ear-and-dying-penniless part.
It’s one thing to dream of “I’d do this for free” and quite another to understand why some artists are, indeed, willing to miss out on the creature comforts most of us take for granted.
There used to be a guy in Manitou Springs whose gig was to set up his easel on the sidewalk and let people watch how quickly he could paint a lovely landscape, suitable for hanging over the bed in a Motel 6, and then he’d sell it to one of them, pop another canvas on the easel and knock off another lovely landscape.
But I didn’t know him; maybe that just was his money gig.
Maybe this cheap-but-remunerative trick left him with deep self-loathing.
And maybe he went home at night and agonized over a blank canvas while the ghost of Monet railed at him over what a worthless, talentless commercial hack he was, and ticked off a list of contemporary artists any one of whom could certainly, surely paint water lilies better than he ever would be able to.
He wouldn't be the first.
Now, let's be clear: We’re speaking in metaphors. This is an imaginary internal monologue, not a slide into madness.
But it’s a brilliantly conceived peek into the internal motivation that distinguishes the artists from the others.
Not just in graphics, of course.
In the early days of the Celtic music revival, I took a friend to a “Boys of the Lough” concert. He was a pretty good musician, but this was early on, and he’d never heard them and, for that matter, he’d never heard Celtic music. But he knew formidable talent when he heard it, whatever the genre.
As we drove home he remarked, “You know how, after most concerts, you just can’t wait to get home and get out your guitar and play? They make me want to go home and just smash all my instruments and throw them away.
Which he could have done.
Or he could have kept playing at the level he’d been playing, feeling no different about his music, or their music, than ever before.
Or he could go home, get out his guitar, play, and try to figure out why their music sounded different and how he could make his music more like theirs.
Which is what he did.
And that, I think, is what Sarah Laing does when she reads a book like “Fun Home” or one of Dylan Horrock’s books or any of the works of the other artists with whom Katherine Mansfield was bludgeoning her.
Yes, it’s intimidating. But the question is, how do you respond to that?
And, just as my friend didn’t decide he had to switch to Celtic music, reading “Blankets” doesn’t require you to go home and duplicate it. In fact, you shouldn’t.
But you absorb it, letting it both inform your future work and provide, not specific things or particular techniques, but a realization of possibilities and of artistic scope and thus the motivation to make your work better than it might otherwise have been.
Writers and artists get tired of being asked in interviews, "What inspires you?" and sometimes give answers like "My landlord."
The fact is, you can't pin down the source of "inspiration" because it's not a matter of what makes you create something. Rent and groceries will indeed suffice for that.
Meanwhile, what makes you do what you do on that other level is something that, well, if you had another way to express it, you'd do that instead. Or your need to express it would become so watered down that it would simply drift away.
Seeing the possibilities through the work of the masters and through the work of your peers is not "inspiration" so much as it is a powerful goad for someone who has already found the road.
And if you poke around on Sarah’s blog, you’ll see that she's in no need of "inspiration."
She has a good many irons in the fire and some genuine achievements to cite. While her current project, a graphic biography of Katherine Mansfield, is no small matter, she shouldn’t be intimidated by it, either.
Unless that’s what it takes.
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