The Other Things.
Me, looking grumpy, as I slowly realise during the course of this piece that I am being an idiot. It’s also a send up of a self portrait I did years ago when I was making a comic about being an idiot.
I wrote in my last article about The Other Things. The parts of life that are categorically not to do with my art, my creative output, my career. Sometimes The Other Things are as mundane as cleaning, food shopping, washing your hair or your clothes - not particularly exciting, but as essential as buying toilet roll or brushing your teeth.
Sometimes The Other Things are much bigger, and more important. Things like exercise and nutrition, replying to emails, sending invoices and budgeting. To be honest, sometimes The Other Things can extend to really big things, like money, running my business, working my part-time job.
Sometimes, the Other Things become so great in number and importance they start to have governance over me. I don’t choose to do The Other Things, they force me to do them. It makes it feel as though I am a pebble in an ocean, and the great foreboding waves will have me as their plaything, leaving me little time to even feel at the helm, much less to go and do a drawing.
I’ve inherited being a chronic list-maker. Here are some of the books literally full of and notes in from the last few years and yes, I have more at home :)
I, like many others, have somehow managed to put making art on a pedestal, and before I can reach this vast and hallowed place of creativity, there are countless fields of should-dos, have-tos, ought-to-dos blocking my way. I feel them stretch out before me, demanding to be threshed, cut, farmed, completed so that then, finally, with all lists crossed off and nothing left to do, I can be creative. I want every deck clear, the fields have been harvested and everything is over in some impossibly final way, so all that is left is the soft, tilled earth and time to focus solely on making work.
It feels like time is needed with nothing else to do, no errands to run, no money to be made, no accounts to balance. Days are spent in ease and smoothness. There must be no distractions, so I can make art in this kind of uncontrollable fervour I idolise in my head. I yearn for some automatically creative state, where I, eyes milky with artistic vision, constantly create, producing again and again as if possessed, experimenting via making, with endless energy, continually creating worthy things, meaningful things, things that help each other to develop and grow and expand.
The original self portrait from 2016 which is so quintessentially me that my mum asked for a copy of it.
It must be said, however, that this state of making art so unfettered by life, doesn’t actually exist (for most of us…we shan’t be including those with a trust fund x). It is frankly hilarious to expect there to be any time at all where there is not at least one Other Thing that pleads to be done. Focus, of course, has to turn to business, jobs, to having enough money to eat and live. As I wrote previously, it sometimes is necessary to turn our focus to The Other Things to recoup and let ideas regenerate, and still…we lambast ourselves for having to send an email, update a website, and check finances instead of making art. How dare I go and buy moisturiser and see my physiotherapist when I could be being an artist? Excusez-moi??!
Suddenly it’s blindingly obvious: clearly, we should all just wilfully make some time, within our lives full of Other Things and responsibilities, to simply put them all on hold for a little bit and do what we want. Maybe this pausing of life happens just once in a while, a couple times a week, maybe even every day or for hours at a time, if you’re very lucky. Like…obviously this is what we should be doing, obviously we should try and do all aspects of our lives as little and often so that they may work together in a cute little patchwork of existence.
In truth, I don’t think this is a final destination. It is something we may all have to practice, forget, remind ourselves of over and over again. It is okay to pause your responsibilities and do something that makes you glow. It’s better than alright to do something that doesn’t have an outcome, or a goal, that doesn’t earn you money or is a yardstick of your development. We need to make time to play, to experiment, to escape from the mire of adulthood whenever we can. Nothing bad will happen if you relax some rigidity and don’t to the dishes right now. Perhaps the feeling of stepping away, having some time to live free, to dip your toes in to joy and freedom might even feel better than the miniature high of completing a mundane task?
