Why make things at all?
Somber september vibes are creeping in with the cool night air.
As I am wont to do come September I am folding into myself and using the gradual slow down between summer frenzy and the brief fall flurry of color to brace myself emotionally for another hard winter.
This winter however I look forward to continuing to learn watercolor painting and hopefully sucking a lot less at it so i have, at least, something i’m aspiring to. And, already my mind is on the next year’s seedlings and garden. Which is to say, my birthday which came and went quietly on the 30th of August has always been the dividing line for me between summer and fall and I cross it violently every year meaning to or not.
As I’ve been waiting to write this next newsletter I’ve been thinking—and being wildly frustrated by my life—too much. I feel this immense pressure come the end of the summer to share everything worth sharing because I know myself and I know as the world changes I won’t allow myself to share those August photos till next August, and only if i remember they exist, and don’t have an over abundance of new August taking precedence.
I’ve been picking through them trying to decide what is worth sharing, and what is worth forgetting, what might be ripe for purging and I had a minor realization that I often share images I think you’ll like, keeping the ones I like for myself because I don’t feel like I can explain to you why I like them, or why they are good and I suppose I don’t trust they are strong enough to explain themselves.
I stumbled into some older photos last week and realized how many never get shared. Tens of thousands of photos being carted from hard drive to hard drive, year after year and it set off some weird feelings about why we even bother to do this at all. Strange to end up there, after starting with I have too many images I want to share but September minds are a thing a part.
This feeling has been rolling around in my head for a bit and every night I tuck myself into bed and spend a few moments with the above painting, which is hanging on my wall, a couple feet from my bed, before putting out the light. This is unusual for me, and I can’t recall a photo I’ve made that inspired me to look at it so much.
I have boxes of prints. Printing has been a serious passion now for years and I spend a small fortune every year on frames. I have frames in front of frames in front of frames because I’ve run out of wall space but not the desire to see the prints. However, this one accidentally good painting has brought in something new to the mix and I’ve been chewing on what that might be, and if it’s why I keep my little stash of photos you’ve never seen, and if it’s part of why we make things at all.
Some of you may audibly guffaw when I say this painfully obvious, but easily forgotten point about the things we make. Some may give up on me entirely. Fair enough.
We make things because the things we make please us.
Fantastically obvious, but something I might have forgotten along the way until I lay still for a few moments and let my eye roam around this painting, and let my mind roam around the ideas and feelings it brings up. The stories of what might be happening around the figure in the car. Where his life is, as he pushes forward.
Some part of my deeper nature finds pleasure in this. Not the pleasure of a torrid sexual escapade, or beating a video game, or making a client really happy. Not the sort of pleasure we feel after a good movie, or even a good book. it’s not an accomplishment or an achievement. No goals have been reached. No new experience is being created.
it’s more like the pleasure of the sun breaking through the bottom of storm clouds and casting every edge alight in a wash of gold. Or the pleasure of sitting in your garden and just appreciating how fantastic nature is, the living things exploding in every direction around you. The molds, and fungi, the bacteria, the insects, the plants and critters all coming together for a few moments to make this little patch of food. Each tomato or zuchinni sort of a work of wonder rather than a transient thing we traded some cash for.
So often, today, in the social media era, we make things and make things and we forget the point of making them is to create this feeling inside ourselves of pleasure. To have artifacts of memory, or place, or feeling blending with the physical (yes, the god damned physical print still matters) to make us feel something richer, deeper and more real than the plastic, artificial world of the internet, media culture and everything else around us.
The painting is so very not great. but it’s effective enough to work and it’s hanging there like a torture device promising more paintings I might somehow luck into, but can’t seem to force my way to. They emerge from the process of making the work, over and over and to tie this back to the little photos I keep mostly for myself, I think those also are perhaps not the best photos. Perhaps don’t have all the elements they need to work in a social world, where the screens are small and the attentions smaller still, but I care about them for what they raise up in me when I look at them and to send them off to die against the ever scrolling wheel seems somehow improper to me.
Something is lost in this conversion.
This giving you photos I like enough, or that might thumbnail well. Photos with enough spectacle to steal your attention so you’ll at least see them. It’s a trade that isn’t working for either of us very well, honestly. You get less chance to see what moves me, and maybe be moved yourself, and I get a hard drive of photos which fleetingly touched something in me, and nothing more.
Such is the nature of audience building. The insidious thing we do even when we don’t meant to do, sometimes even when we clearly mean not to. validation is so soothing to the unrest of the mind, but it’s no balm like something that aesthetically touches us somewhere honest. We need not forget this.
For this moment, I’m convinced if I woke up with 1000 more subscribers tomorrow I would get less pleasure (though perhaps more opportunity) from that than I get for a few minutes each night staring at a painting and mulling and then wondering how I did that, and why everything I’ve painted since is literal garbage.
I think when we consider things the question should not be why do we make things at all, rather, why do we share the things we make? why do we need that external loop. I don’t have a resolute answer but my immediate sense is because we’ve spent too much time making things we only half care about and need the world to fill the other half up for us.
Of course, this excludes all the money stuff. The earnings off subscribers, followers, courses, prints, whatever you do to make a bit of money—or even a living. But to my mind, these are very different projects. One a business, which would do well to listen to it’s audience, and to try to shape it’s offerings and comms to find and keep connected to that audience and the other is a single person exploring the world visually, trying to create something out of nothing for hard to understand reasons, and very murky end goals. If you’re pretending to be one of those, while behaving like the other it seems frustration will follow you all of your days.
I’m not sure where I sit in all this, but I’d like to think more about it, maybe find a way to a second painting I like, and try to remember this stuff I share with you is meant to be me sharing things that move me, not things I’m guessing will move you.
to that end, here’s a smattering of images from august i enjoy. not well, sequenced, and probably not even properly finally edited but i want them out in the world.
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and now having added the images.. I did it again. I put in a bunch of “I kind of like that, its worth seeing” images alongside the ones I really care about.
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Till next week…
I share your concerns, but could never have expressed them as eloquently as you have here. Thank you!
I totally get what you are saying. I have all these questions and doubts too from time to time. And I really have no good answers. But I am glad you shared your thoughts and your photos with us anyway! I always enjoy your work (writing and photography, and in this case your painting too!). So please keep sharing even if you don‘t see any good reason for it.