I mentioned in an email yesterday to my Costa Rican friend that when I am making art I appear to be integrating rest, work and prayer all in one action. This is difficult to explain but for the creative process which I believe is one of the distinctions that make us so peculiarly human. That is, along with our sense of spirituality, or the numinous. The creative process is also in many ways tied in to or could be thought of as an integral facet of our spirituality.
I think this is why in our society there is still this erroneous but inevitable tendency of elevating artists, and this especially refers to film or music stars, as near quasi-deities. Olympus revived. At the very least, their glamour and fame would appear to invest in them a sense of moral authority and expertise that would otherwise pass unnoticed. Think Gwyneth Paltrow or Bono, for example. Or better still, don't. If they weren't famous they would simply be dismissed as neurotic, righteous blowhards that really don't know much about anything, which is to say, they would be rather like me and you, Gentle Reader. Perhaps just a little more annoying.
Yes, in our secular and spiritually empty culture that elevates science and logic way above spiritual wisdom and ethics, people are still going to want to vent their instinctive impulse to worship and adore the numinous, so instead of turning their attention to a God they cannot see, they worship at the altar of celebrity. And celebrities have become their new priests, gods and sages. Pathetic, yes? When you think how flawed and human they are, and away from their glow of fame and glamour how really pathetic they are, nonentities every bit as tiny and insignificant as you and me, Gentle Reader.
I will never see celebrity or fame. Perhaps because my art isn't good enough, and really, it isn't that good. But also for an even more salient reason. I'm just not interested. I don't care. This by the way has nothing to do with sour grapes. I am a Christian. this is more than a mere belief system. My life is dedicated and consecrated to Christ, though some of my readers, on reading some of the content of Content Under Pressure, might be inclined to think otherwise. If I were to be offered fame or celebrity, I would have to deny my faith, or at least walk in a direction other than the quiet life of prayer, consecration and service towards which Christ has called me.
This became only too clear to me while I was still a working artist. And I was being lured by the sugar cookie of fame and celebrity. That is how you make it as an artist. You get discovered then scooped up by a prestigious gallery and they sell all your lovely art to wealthy patrons and before you know it, all you have to do to pay the mortgage is keep making art. Could it get sweeter? Well, you get famous too, so you can charge higher prices for your work, then you become more famous, and your prices keep rising, then you get inducted in the Order of Canada, and suddenly you have jacked up your prices so high that you had might as well be already dead and mouldering in your crypt.
I live in holy anonymity. I live in creative anonymity. I paint and draw at home, and I draw in coffee shops and elsewhere when I'm outside. Of course I attract attention to myself, artists always do. And of course, I simply don't care any more. perhaps I never did. I might never sell another work of art again. I don't care. I do love participating in this whole divine dynamic of co-creating beauty and meaningfulness with God. If this is public witness, then so be it. This is work, yes, but it is also prayer and rest. And sometimes it is absolute pure joy, Gentle Reader
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