Artists Passion

So many of us, like myself are incredibly eager to have someone see our work, notice us that we forget, or never think. The wounds we bring from our childhood are viciously deep, and raw resulting from years, decades, lifetimes, if you will, of not being accepted for who we are, our unique quirks that make us the human and the artists that we are. In our sincerest efforts to succeed we leap before looking, forget the importance and necessity of asking the hard questions up front. We are afraid of rejection. And so we abandon ourselves as those closest to us, often times family members on whom our lives and hearts depended often did.

It’s like the little girl, who after carefully scraping the front and back labels from the Log Cabin Syrup Bottle and then filling it with the prettiest and brightest yellow daisies she could pick, delivers it to her mother, who just stands there, unmoved and unaffected. The mother is more concerned with how the little girl got the bottle, and from whose garden she had stolen the flowers. She overlooks the gift so cheerfully and imaginatively prepared.

Many of us as artists come from this place. And it is out of this hurt that we create—write our stories, develop our songs, complete our paintings, draft and post our blogs each day infusing them with such care and all of who we are.

Yet the business of the art world is not heart-felt and heart-held by so many who make their livings and fortunes by bartering and selling the works of those whose work they represent and publish.

As artists, wounded and sensitive individuals that we are, we must become the caretaker our parents never were, responsible to not only our commitment to create, but that of embracing every fiber of who we are and stopping at nothing to protect that person, that lonely child who creates to receive love and thus heal. The love we most desire and desperately search can only be given, granted by ourselves.

Even if our parents and family were supportive, we must take that love and support shown to us and transform it into a tenacious caretaker of our souls. We cannot let the business of art kill our spirit to create art. We must become artists and living and thriving. We do this by remembering the hurts and seeing the gift of and in our ability to create, and our work to transform what was once a bottle that held syrup into a flower vase. And in this remembrance and recognition asking the hard questions.

We are the flower vase. And the flowers in the vase are our work given to the world on terms that are fair and just for us that we might continue to work and offer hope and possibilities of positive change.