Being an artist is a constant, overwhelming, all-consuming obsession. It’s a hook at the nape of your neck, dragging you along so you can never quite see where you’re going; it’s a gnawing in your stomach, a persistent craving for a food you can’t place; it’s a staccato plucking at your hamstrings. It keeps you on your toes and searching. The obsession, if untreated, becomes its own disease — a gnawing hollowness that leaves you desperate for a cure. You become preoccupied with stopgap measures to fill it: dressing like an artist, looking like an artist, talking like an artist, being esoteric and zany like an artist. These are the things which can temporarily trick your brain into thinking you have achieved the goal of becoming an artist. The truth, however, is that the only cure to your disease is an obsession with art.
Confession: I have always been obsessed with being an artist. But I have not, unfortunately, always been obsessed with art.
When I was younger, I was always convinced that the next place had more for me. In high school, living in the boonies, I knew that the second I arrived in Richmond I would be overwhelmed with opportunity, inspiration, and beautiful people who would always say the right thing to challenge me into action. “The City” was the place where artists became artists, because “The City” was the place where life multiplied in on itself exponentially. “The City” was the native habitat of genius, a thing which you could never find somewhere like Sussex County.
Then I actually came to Richmond, and I did not quite find that creative explosion I expected. I just found the potential for it. I found VCU, my arts classes, galleries, DIY shows. But I did not ascend into a higher consciousness and begin painting 17 paintings a day as I thought I would.
Okay, that’s what I was missing. I was in “The City,” but I wasn’t living “The City.”
How do I live “The City?” I thought maybe it was all about who I knew and talked to. So, I needed the right friends. To get the right friends, I needed to be in the right spaces, and I needed to belong in those spaces. To belong in those spaces, I needed the right clothes, the right face, the right ideas, the right attitudes.
I adopted those things, molded myself around them: late-night trysts I only half-enjoyed with people I half-hated, partying beyond my means, barely eating to get myself into what I thought was the right body for the sake of wearing the right clothes. I had an arsenal of bands and shows and albums in the back of my head alongside all my opinions on various venues locked and loaded for any conversation. This did not work either.
Not to say I was never making art — I did make it. But it wasn’t the right art. It wasn’t the art that poured out of me without thought, or the art that broke boundaries. The gnawing went unaddressed. It was the art of a student, still learning how to make any art at all, and only hitting at the edges of what I wanted it to be about 1% of the time.
I wanted the art I caught glimpses of late at night when my thinking shut off: the essays hiding in my hindbrain, the poems pushing against my sternum, the paintings nestled in my ribcage. Between the still-lives and redundant exercises of my classes, I tried for works at the core of me, which were all tangled up in my veins. But all I got were half-formed attempts at profundity: lots of sad-looking girls and woe-is-me-isms, drawings of dead trees and bongs and crying eyes. After finishing my hundredth meaningless studio assignment, I’d hunch over my desk and draw like my life depended on it, but I wouldn’t find much of anything that satisfied me. So I was profoundly bored with my art.
I spent my first year in Richmond fed up with art and everything around it. Wandering Bowe Street Parking Deck, staring wide-eyed at other folks’ assignments, I was at an absolute loss as to why I couldn’t dig the dreamstuff out of me and put it to paper like it seemed everyone else could. So when I wasn’t locking myself away in my dorm, I made myself into someone I sort-of despised: I partied to the point I couldn’t think, and at house shows I talked to who I thought were the right people even though I hated them, and I became obsessed with “The City” — because the potential was in “The City”. The potential was in The Camel, and Broad Street at night, and morning walks in the Fan. The potential was absolutely not anywhere within me. I was convinced I had to go out and find it somewhere in Richmond. Because Richmond was “The City,” which meant it had everything I needed, if I just bent myself into the right key.
But like I said: I didn’t find anything.
Then I visited New York City this past August. To be honest, there is a certain phenomenon best likened to a honeymoon phase, wherein “The City” does actually give you that short-term burst of creativity when you first arrive in it. I landed in New York and immediately filled pages in my notebook and punched nonstop ideas into my notes app and kept saying, hysterically, like a prayer: “I need to live here. I need to live here. I need to live here.”
I was entranced. Bushwick really is like a bigger Richmond, and it was everything I loved about Richmond on the large-scale. It was old brick buildings, indie bookshops, beautifully dressed people, the place in which my daydreams of being a young and cool and mysteriously comfortably wealthy artist always took place. I said to myself, resolutely, “I get it now.” My problem was Richmond the whole time. New York was where I was born to be. It was just that I needed to make art in New York. I didn’t have to keep searching around Richmond or trying to turn myself into Richmond. I just needed to leave, and go up to the Big Apple.
Are we noticing a pattern of behaviors now?
I sat on the New York idea for a few weeks, bounced it back and forth. I kept getting really excited about it, then bummed (New York is expensive), then really excited again. Then I told my dad about it, who asked me, why?
What does New York have that you need, Lucille? My dad asked. Not that I don’t want you to travel. But why do you need to move to New York?
I spluttered out a million reasons, none of which I really fully believed. Then I went home. With a healthy dose of shame that we all feel when we realize our parents are right, I looked in the mirror and I asked myself again, why?
I thought, wait, what? What does New York actually have for me that Richmond doesn’t? Is there no paint in Richmond? No pencils? No paper? What is it about New York that I need?
I really wasn’t able to put a finger on it. New York was aesthetically different from Richmond, but there really, really wasn’t anything there I didn’t have. Richmond has studio space. Richmond has artists. Richmond has cool galleries and indie bookshops. New York had all of that, on a grander and frankly richer scale.
There was absolutely nothing about it that would make me produce art more than Richmond does,or more than Sussex did.
What did get me to make art was this whole realization that it didn’t really matter where it was. A month after this whole New York crash-out I began to paint, and paint, and paint, and I realized the issue really had been me the whole time. That is to say, the issue had been that I mistreated my art addiction; I searched for the cure in all the wrong places. I searched for it outside of me.
For the sake of this essay, let’s loosely define an “artist” as someone who is driven to capture and relay life as they see it. This is an impossible goal. So then the artist is someone who, by definition, will never be fully satisfied. The artist’s mission is probably insanity in its purest form. The artist will draw the same woman a million times to try to explain to the viewer why they are absolutely enamored with the bow of her lip; the poet will write a dozen poems about the same breakup, each featuring completely contradicting views on the whole situation. The artist’s goal is unreachable, but it’s the act of reaching for it which fulfills the artist, treats the obsession. Because every time we reach for that goal, every time we get a little closer to it, a tiny molecule in our heart settles into place.
Artists are always, then, searching for that one puzzle piece that will let them pour out all the art which finally, 100%, explains to the world life-as-they-see-it.
So here’s where “The City” comes in: why do artists become so obsessed with it?
It’s because when we become frustrated with our goal, we think we need to move on and relay some other sort of life. We think we’re looking at the wrong thing, the wrong place. We become convinced there’s something wrong with the place we’re already in, and it seems like “The City” has so much life for us to look at that if we go to “The City” we’ll surely find the perfect image, the perfect turn of phrase, the perfect composition to satisfy our aching. But really it’s the aesthetic of it – the opulence of it – that convinces us that whatever we can’t find here, we can find there.
Opulence, not just in drugs, parties, clubs (although maybe that’s part of it for many of us), but opulence, perceived, in the abundance of knowledge, thought and thinking, art, art-making, artists. The abundance of life. As in: “The City” represents life, the thing we are on a quest to make known to others. The artist cannot make art unless there is some kind of life, a living-breathing thought or feeling to capture. And so to the artist, “The City” — any city, but for the purpose of this essay, we’re talking New York — is Mecca. “The City” = an abundance of life = an abundance of potential to capture and relay, through poetry and painting and whatever else it is that passes for art these days.
Here’s the secret: there is nothing wrong with seeking inspiration. There is nothing wrong with seeking epiphany. The key now becomes where and how you search.
There are an infinite amount of images and experiences and beautiful details out there for an artist to delight in. But we can not begin to treat seeking inspiration like neverending consumption. You can not treat experience like conquest, art as ownership over life. Taking in more and more and more, without thought, will get you nothing but a crammed brain and self-hatred when you can’t do anything with it. Jumping from kernel of life to kernel of life without stopping, lingering, fully considering, is self-sabotage for the artist. All you’ll do is overwhelm your soul and your mind.
The key is not leaving, nor is it finding a new place. The key is lingering. At least for a few moments. Linger until you feel like you’ve fully understood and attempted to relay what you’re lingering at.You don’t need to keep seeking out more and more and more. You only need to find that one small thing which fascinates you, which speaks to that ribcage painting/sternum poem/hindbrain essay.
The thing getting in your way is that you’re not examining those pieces inside you, you’re not stopping to listen when they hum. You’re focused on the distant possibilities and not what’s right in front of you.
And, yes, essentially what I’m telling you to do is to live in the present. Because the present, no matter where you physically are, is where you’re going to make art. If you want to make art right now, if you want to address that restlessness that builds in your skin when you go too long without chipping away at that quest to be understood, then you’re not making art in the far-off city (or secluded monastery, or small town, or whatever it is you think holds more for you) of your dreams. You’re making it wherever you are right here, right now.
Listen. You can find life with a quiet morning in Monroe Park, if only you consciously think to yourself and hold it to be true that you are looking at Monroe Park, not New York. Monroe Park has all the same proofs of life as you could see in Washington Square: there, the couple breaking up — there, the woman walking her dog — there, the smoking man telling himself he’ll quit for the fifth morning in a row — there, the strangers smiling as they pass each other — there, the empty bottles and wrappers left behind by nervous teenagers…
We think places like New York simply have so much more life to see, capture, reproduce. And sure, maybe the population in numbers dwarfs us. But the potential for life – the potential to gain new understanding, to settle all those silly artists’ questions in your hearts — is just as present in Monroe Park as Washington Square. It’s just as present at the Warehouse as at CBGB’s, or at the VMFA versus the MOMA, or at any cafe, library, sidewalk, or front porch anywhere in the world. Just look at it.
Graphics by Maddie Bui