Artistic Darwinism

I went to the workshop yesterday and watched new photographers explore alternative methods of making images, often using a scanner as their camera. They were very excited, and so it was fun. I, too, am ready today to begin experimenting a bit more. I did not color enough as a kid. I did not play enough with paint. Sports. I was good at almost all of them and not so good at drawing and coloring. So, as I always say, you do most what you do best and vice-versa. Now I am trying only the second part of the equation. And it is true. The more time I can give over to pursuing it, the better I do. And then, like any kid, I want to put the results on the refrigerator door. Consider this my refrigerator door. "Look, look," I heard the young photographers say, though maybe not in those words, holding up a new image. "Look what I did." Now it is a matter of how much time they will give over to it in the coming weeks and months and years.

They are all so talented, and I want them all to continue on, but I know that everything will want to get in the way. For some of them, the interference began before they got there. One could not come because of work. Another was stopped at the last moment by "a family emergency." I wonder which of them will break out their tools and work on something today. So many distractions and obligations. And I begin to think that only the selfish ones have a chance. Being selfish may be more important than being talented, for I've watched a lot of talented people produce nothing. The writer Peter Matthiessen once told me, "There are a lot of people who are more talented than I am, but there is nobody who works as hard as I do." And Peter truly has had a long and wonderful career. Since Peter is a Buddhist monk, I doubt that he thinks of himself as selfish, and maybe there is a better word for telling people that you must be alone, that you have to have time to work. But I've known many artists and writers whose relationships have been busted up over what they do or want to do, and I've known others who have merely given all that up.

It seems the time to give yourself over to your own creativity is when you are young before everything else gets in the way . But how do you tell that to youth who feels the luxury of time spread out before them like some Pasha's endless wealth? You can't. And therein lies the tale, as they used to say.

But even giving yourself over to the thing you want to pursue is not enough. You must be pursue a form of autism, too, a listening to your own voice over the voices of others. You must be willing to continue when there is no cheering for what you do, when nobody notices the picture on the refrigerator door, or worse, when the nay-sayers begin. How does a kid do that?

There seems no way to tell it.

And really, there is probably no need. There is a type of natural selection at work, I presume, weeding out the ones who should not send their products into the world. Artistic Darwinism, I guess.

I will try to color today. Maybe literally. I will break out the scissors and the tape and see what I can do. And tonight, maybe I'll hold something up and say "Look, look. . . look what I did."

Mmm-hmm. Isn't that something.