Four Amazing Years And Very Little Art to Show
A portrait I finished toward the end of my tenure as VAR’s Director.
I decided to step away from being the Director of Visual Artists of Richmond a year ago. It was an organization that I co-founded, and it took that much time to disengage. This is in fact, the first week that I can safely say I’m done. I transferred all of VAR’s accounts, saved the materials I felt should be saved, introduced its new leaders to our community partners and now I am free to make art again.
It’s not like I didn’t make ANY art. I did make some art, and I even participated in some exhibitions. But I always felt guilty that I was not taking care of something VAR-related. And as with any start-up, there was always something. I could not concentrate on my trayectory as an artist or on what I wanted to say with my preferred medium, painting. I didn’t feel resentful because I felt I was helping to create something important and necessary. But I felt guilty as I perused Instagram and noticed everyone else was able to send work to shows while I was writing grant applications.
From time to time, some well-meaning colleagues would ask me if I was finding time to make art, and I would always lie and say I was, then change the subject trying to avoid the embarrassment of further inquiry. Others, with noticeable concern in their voices, would warn me about the perils of burn-out and would prescribe art-making getaways as the remedy. “Rent a cottage and take your materials!” But I never once adopted the idea.
The art I made these four years felt like a flirtation, like an incomplete statement about my art self. There were half-baked ideas floating in my head, some of them transferred to sketchbooks, only to be promptly abandoned when the next VAR busy season arrived. I finished some good work, but it was either isolated experiments or work that didn’t represent any kind of challenge, conceptually or in execution. Two years in, I was ready to tackle new terrain, but I had no time and no stamina to take on new work. I was more occupied than ever once our team shrank and additional duties, like vampires, piled on and sucked the life force out of me.
The culmination of that crisis came in the form of a painting that I could not finish. It was something rare for me not to complete a painting to which I had committed. But there it was, week after week staring at me in my studio, first facing me, then facing the wall. The woman who had sat for it was asking me when I was going to complete it and at first I responded, but as the months stretched into two years, I began avoiding her. Not having the time for continuity in your work is bad, because you can’t spare the energy to look at the problems to be solved in your painting. I kept passing it by, but I didn’t have enough time or mental energy to figure out what was wrong. I managed to finish it eventually, and it even went to a show. But it will forever represent this difficult time period.
I am now free of all that and after a brief one-week vacation, feel ready to embark on more sustained cycles of art-making. I cannot tell you how excited I am to have a normal artist life. To have the time to visit artist friends. To have the chance to see work hanging in galleries. And (I never thought I would say this) even to have the time to update this website!