shoving the little life raft
making art about making money
This newsletter has been lingering half-finished in my drafts folder for a couple months under the working title:
“dumb shit to pay bills”
This expletive-laden tour through my employment folly has branched off several times in the intervening weeks—
Am I writing about taxes as a 1099 lifer? Am I writing about how many ill-fitting hats I wear to be a working creative in the US? Does anyone care about all the unaligned, unsexy, distasteful & deeply dumb shit I’ve done to pay bills over the years? How could I pick just one story from this parade of horrors? They’re all so rich! …so…telling…
Typically, when I start telling a story about one of the many employment capers that made me who I am today, I hear— “What HAVEN’T you done???” And that is a very good and legitimate question.
One of my favorite responses is, “Saved for retirement!” HA! HA! HA!
But I’ve been doing a new kind of storytelling around this recently— in my sketchbook. This has been profoundly therapeutic. And I think I’m teasing something out here that may well leave the sketchbook & become its own body of work some day…but for now I’ll share from a raw state.
In 2018 Neon & I left everything we loved in Portland and took a job managing a resort in the remote mountains of Northern California. And less than a year later, we left— utterly broken in mind, body & spirit.
Escaping that situation was so necessary that when the pandemic announced itself just a few months later, our response was: “OH MY GOD— at least we’re not still at the resort!!!!!”
I would say the experience resembled The Shining, but in The Shining the couple didn’t have to deal with 24hr surveillance and share the isolated property with fundamentalist Christian, Trump-deifying, MAGA employers...
Anyway…here’s a story I don’t usually tell when I’m reliving this comedy of errors…
when we left the resort job
i had such bad panic attacks,
i had to envision i was
putting the owners
on a little
life raft...
...always facing away from me...
...wearing life vests...
...i pushed the
raft off
with my foot
&
watched
them
float
far,
far,
away...
...off the horizon line...A prompt for you this week…
I’d wager that most everyone has some kind of difficult employment story…
When we artists get together to talk about the ups and downs of freelancing and creative business ownership, sometimes we leave out a lot of color & detail around the least sexy, most demeaning, most torturous shit we’ve also done to pay bills and how that’s affected us. And why wouldn’t we? Shitty employers manage to trigger the deepest of wounds, and ditto for “money stuff”.
And I can cuss and laugh my way through any number of bombastic employment stories— but at the end of the day, they all happened because I, an artist, didn’t have enough money to survive without them.
Enter: ART!
• If you had one page to narrow in on one specific story…one specific job...one specific personal note about your “Employment History”, what might be on it? Can you isolate one visual element, a symbol, and draw that on the page, too? [The image of the little raft that saved me from debilitating panic attacks ended up saying so very much about this job all on its own…]
-or-
• Maybe you want to craft your “REAL Resume”— Neon & I find this highly therapeutic. Forget what a formal resume is supposed to do and make one that actually describes your experiences & competencies. This is for your eyes only, so make it fun! Go for the ha has! Or the tears! Get it out!
This spring I’ve been counting my blessings to have some very aligned opportunities come my way—
From a lovely collector spotting art (in this newsletter!) she wanted to add to her walls, to a new one-on-one creative partnership with a talented creator, to a business consultancy for an arts non-profit I believe in very deeply— and the contributions from all of you who buy subscriptions here at Image Word Mystery.
Thank you for working with me, studying with me, living with my art & sharing what I do with the people you love.
Please join me May 19th for the next Creative Jam: THE EXQUISITE MYSTERY— Monthly & annual subscriptions are an incredibly inexpensive way to join these intimate creative gatherings & boost joy:
Community Offering!:
May 17th, 12-1pm central— My friend & fellow Image Word Mysterian Miles Seidan will be hosting a free introductory sesh for his excellent Branding For Artists workshop, available now through ViTra Academy. Miles is an awesome teacher, a wonderful human and really knows his stuff. Register here! I’ll see you there!
xo,
For the prompt, my isolated element is a process—the battle for beauty. Not just aesthetics, but the gestalt of any harmonious experience. A bulletproof strategy. An adaptable system. A moment of connection. An uncomfortable lesson.
Subtitle: "All art and no pay makes rafts a drawn joy." (?) It's truly incredible what nonsense creatives deal with—constantly having to prove our value. The joy of creation mingled with societal lack of appreciation and compensation. Working for scraps of paper and invisible digits. Nothing current (dead guys on dead trees) or see-able (the binary blinds) to modern currency. So yes—to all the chest-thumping, t®unnp-pumping, claim-jumping, field-slumping lumps—float away...