art and love

art is not for the faint hearted.

i think someone else said that, but i can now officially concur.

this sounds like i'm building a myth around the whole sordid thing, but, given the hearbreaking week i've had, you'll just have to deal with it.

and i never really believed the maxim 'you can't have your cake and eat it to'. maybe because i am an artist and the image of a cake, in my mind, counted as 'having' your cake, i always believed that it was just an excuse for people willing to settle. but it turns out that's not true. you can't have love and art in the same room.

i realised today that art is a lonely business. and i can understand why artists hook up with each other. it's probably easier to deal with the elephant in the room or the monkey on your back or whatever zoological metaphor you want to use for the fact that art takes all your time and your focus and your life.

it's the thing that has you living quite a strange life - the kind where you live on meagre funds, pursue the strangest kinds of travel, keep ridiculous hours and think about things in quite a perverse way sometimes.

it never turns off. you become slightly enslaved.

or perhaps that's just how i feel this week. a week in which the reality of love and life on the opposite side of the world has come to a head. the reality of having to return to a life in which my work becomes my primary relationship again.

 the thing about art is that, although it's satisfying on one level, it's not an equal partnership. in fact, it's mostly unsatisfying. it's certainly not intimate, or sexual, or tender. it constantly needs satiating, even when you're almost satisfied with the nature of what you make, there's still a sense of 'the next level'.

there are still things to be done, places to take the work, audiences to pursue and ideas to expand upon. it's always there, nagging you like a fucking fishwife wanting the dishes done.


are there any great artists who have managed to have great relationships too? in trying to find some hopeful role models, all i've been able to see is artists either in a relationship with art, or in a relationship with another artist in which the relationship is almost a creative collaboration. and, forgive me for being picky, but the last thing i want to do is be in a relationship with another artist - we're a self-absorbed and selfish bunch.


sigh.

lucky i have work to make.