According to my whiteboard, I have a solo show coming up in 16 weeks. I booked the show late last year at a local arts space. There’ll be about 24 metres of space to fill with works that will mostly will be new; never exhibited before. It’s head down, bum up getting this done.
This is all standard for an artist who calls herself professional. I mean, I don’t put bread on my table with sales of my work. Haha! That would be a VERY restricted diet. Every now and then I make a sale which I immediately turn into purchase of someone else’s creative product. I’m probably not so much professional as just bloody-minded. Bloody, but unbowed, as Henley would say.
Speaking of which, I could probably do with reading Invictus right now because I’m entering into a stage that, after being on this weird ride for over 20 years, I’m quite familiar with. I’ll become increasingly anxious and paranoid about the whole shebang. Will anyone come to see the work? Will anyone even LIKE said work or give it the time of day? Will I be totally embarrassed, overlooked and generally regarded as a failure? Will I be able to organise the music and the food and the social media? Ugh.
Just the idea of hosting an Opening Event fills me with terror – I want to stay, on my own, in the studio thanks – but it’s what you have to do. Getting your work ‘out there’ is part of the gig. This is all of course at a TOTAL remove from the original creative endeavour. What crazy animals us humans are!! In my ideal world I would have a fulltime PA who would deal with all this shite and in their down time would prepare canvases and clean the studio. Better buy a lottery ticket.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley
1849–190