Prompted by a chat with artist Sean Simmans last night, I got to thinking that it is impossible to ever fully arrive in the arts field.
You may be doing poorly or extremely well on the scale of subjective success, but wherever you are is only temporary and never stable.
Any art form is about finding one’s voice, which is different at 30 than it is at 50 than it is at 70. Your style will constantly change, sometimes–and ideally–for the better, but also sometimes not.
Unfortunately, we have been sold this packaged idea of what success looks like in the art field, genres ripping apart the industry, and marketing madness brainwashing us into what we’re supposed to think art looks like . . . but it’s never accurate.
Ultimately, art is living and fluid and is like water, always flowing, not a dam in sight.
Your work might be polished, but even in a polished state, it’s incomplete because there is always that one thing you could have done better or a little bit smarter.
Art isn’t prefect. It’s not supposed to be. Then it isn’t art. That’s Sean talking and I agree with him.
Whatever your craft, where you are is where you are. If the art is made, you’re an artist. And, in that context, you have arrived . . . but our work never will.
It’s all about the journey.