Some notes on doubt
I was volunteering for a local artist-run gallery, before I started my degree. I hadn’t been faced with the question before and I was left fumbling when visitors and friends of the gallery asked if I was “an artist too?” Instead of easily answering yes, I would answer with what would appear to be irritating modesty. Instead of having warm open conversations, I would cut them off with a watery reply. Partially a lack of confidence, definitely. But also partly an unnecessary decision I’d made about myself and art.
I soon stopped volunteering for the gallery. I didn’t have the time for it once uni started and maybe I was sick of fielding these questions.
‘I was embarrassed to say I wasn’t studying art, it felt like confessing that my heart wasn’t in it.’
I had a conversation with a man who, when I confessed this fact, made an insufferable comment about “cross-pollination between science and art”. I thanked him for his advice and waited until I could lock up the gallery.
My output is inconsistent. I will regularly spend nearly 6 months without painting much at all. I relish in bitter fantasies of all the art I could make if I wasn’t working or studying, despite making these choices. Cruelly trying to ‘other’ the title of artist to people who are less busy than me. Regretfully, they are busy too. I had a conversation with my friend Lulu, where we both agreed that we lacked the self-belief in our work to really commit to being ‘artists’. We don’t feel passionately enough about the value in our work that it needs to be seen by the world. Neither of us could imagine selling our work.
Before choosing not to study art, I had fixated on this idea that me making art had no grounding in reality. Of course art is important to culture and society etc., I just didn’t think mine would be. I made my doubt into a conscious decision. Clearly interrogating the premise of making art to this degree is not productive.
Yet arbitrary interrogation of subjects (often to an unproductive end) is usually the point. Even if I treat my work as purely craft or a form of diarying, it’s hard not to internally write a convoluted artist statement that deems it worthy. One of these unwritten artist statements places my work as a ritualistic embellishment of memories. By drawing or painting, I am arbitrarily assigning significance to these benign moments. I like this explanation, but I still doubt its truth.
You can find Sean and some of his art on instagram @meanseanm