I love your honesty and vulnerability here. I've been showing art for a long time, so I'm very familiar with the feeling you describe after seeing your work in a gallery. One of my friends calls it "post-artum depression". I think it's a kind of letdown of energy after all the effort of making art and getting it out into the world. It's a bit of an empty feeling, of "what now?" You are not alone! Thanks for sharing your art and yourself, and keep going.
Wow Duane, what a burden you've had to carry, but what grace and courage. I'm blown away. Your writing is as good and as insightful as your art. Beautiful in fact.
You are one of these people with many talents. Love the art included in this post, you have a gift, keep going!! I'd love to see this type of art in more schools, cafes, houses etc
What has been your burden has yielded much beauty. Pain into beauty is part of my life's purpose I sense. I've been scribbling things on truth lately, and contrasting light. Really like what you've said here on truth. Powerful.
Thank you. It’s easy to appear graceful and courageous when you can craft the story on paper. Those closest to me can attest to the ugliness, the wallowing, and the rage. Unfortunately, they’ve not only seen it but have been victims to it. It’s crumble relationships and squander opportunities. I have not been poised so much as resolved. But that too, is no small thing.
“truth and contrasting light! – Love that! I can’t wait to see where that leads!
I'm sure you've heard all of this a 1000 times so I'll try to say it as it comes. Maybe what you describe as ugliness, wallow and rage is really honesty about your pain. You feel life so sensitively, so rawly and the cost is the pain you suffer. Susan Mc Mahon wrote a piece I saw today, I'll try to link below but the bit that stood out was
'It is the excavation of buried truths
that ultimately set us free,
but first we must break open
for the light to get in and illuminate
what sleeps in the heart
There's so much honesty in your writing Duane and I'll guess your living too. Most people won't feel life as you do, won't wrestle and bear witness to their life like you do. They might not show their cracks, but some don't really live. Or create beauty as you do.
Don't ever stop creating, it's your life's purpose. Your gift shines so bright.
"but first we must break open" - so deeply resonant.
Kierkegaard said that a poet is "An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon'". It is the task of the artists to break open, to shatter, to explode, to turn it into a song, and to invite other to sing along.
Yes! I hear you about creativity as a way of coping - I use it that way too!! Congratulations on having so much good artwork completed!! That's the most important part. Congratulations on the gallery exhibit too of course - but the work is the thing IMHO. I've been exhibiting in galleries for over 25 years and that feeling you spoke of "feeling nothing" is in my experience a normal even "good" thing - It works best for me when I don't have expectations. When it's enough to have done the work itself and then to have shared it with others is a bonus, the cherry on the cupcake.
Thanks so much Sue! I really appreciate you taking the time to read! It’s proving to be a really common feeling for many artists. I assumed that there was no way I was the only one having that experience, and it was that curiosity, that made me want to write about it. It seemed like something worth having a conversation about. Something worth discussing. One that would beneficial for us to have together. It’s one thing to say that the work is the most important thing, that its the only part that really matters, but when you are existentially confronted with the truth of it in an experiential way, it’s clear confirmation. Thanks again!
You're welcome! And thank you for writing! I agree, we're in this creative life together and the more we realize that we have in common the stronger we can be. Yes, gotta love that real-life confirmation of sayings like "the work is the thing"!! "Just. Keep. Going." is another one of those sayings worth writing off and thumbtacking to an often viewed surface in ones art making area or writing on the bathroom mirror or tattooing on ones wrist - whatever keeps you going. 😉
I wanted to catch up on your letters for a while and I finally got a chance to sit down and read this one. I hope to read them all and be caught up by the end of the week.
I am so glad you are on Substack and I came across your beautiful work. I love your collages! They speak to me. I also love your honesty and vulnerability. I relate to so much that you are saying. As someone who is highly sensitive and has struggled with depression and anxiety her whole life, I always appreciate when people are open about their struggles and thoughts.
I think it is such a gift to express oneself through words and images. I truly believe that the most important gift as an artist is to create connection with others, honest connections. That to me is success.
I also relate to your feelings about seeing your images in a gallery. As someone who has had her work exhibited in many places, I have always been surprised about how fleeting the excitement about it is and how it ultimately didn‘t mean to me that much after all. It‘s weird and something I still can‘t quite explain.
But when someone writes to me letting me know that they connected with a particular image or they were inspired by an image and it touched them deeply, those words always stick with me and bring me a deep sense of joy and meaning.
You are a a true artist! No doubt!
Thank you for your creativity and sharing it with the world!
Thank you so much for such heart felt reply! I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one who has had this experience. That’s one of teh main reasons I decided to talk about it. I almost didn’t. I felt like I would sound ungrateful or melodramatic. But i though that perhaps there were others who had felt this way to but were also hesitant to talk about it. It’s easy to talk about goals and ambitions. It’s easy to talk about progress and practice and teh wins. But its much more difficult to discuss the lets downs and disappointments, especially in relation to teh things we achieve. It’s hard to talk about that but we need to. Thanks again for reading!
I came to collage because of a chronic illness that forces me to take a break from time to time, and it is there, in those stages of recovery, when creativity becomes a turning point, a lifeline. And the most important thing is not the final result, the hanging work, but the satisfaction and calm of the process.
creativity as a turning point with the stages of recovery - that is so beautiful!
"the calm of the process" - Yes! It's easy for me to lose sight of this, but this has always been teh most vital part of art making for me. The quiet qualities of the movements. The meditative qualities of watching and responding, witnessing something come to life and take shape.
I relate to all of this so much! For me, that blank feeling of “nothing” is usually a kind of dissociating from many many feelings, often conflicting. Also I have never found any career milestone to be as satisfying as I imagined! I’ve come to think that the true value of these sorts of achievements is just the permission or support to keep on making art — the process more than the product, in other words. The main thing is to just to keep going. :)
Thanks for this Alison! "that blank feeling of 'nothing'" - the conflict of overwhelming feelings - the detachment that happens reactionarily - You've summarized it perfectly. i think you're absolutely right, underneath the dissatisfaction, underneath the disenchantment and heartbreak is a kind of liberation. if it doesn't matter. if it's inconsequential, if it makes no difference ultimately, then you're free to do anything creatively. There are no consequences for following any artistic impulse for chasing any creative curiosity. If there's nothing to gain, then that means there's also nothing to lose. Thanks again for chiming in! I appreciate it!
Beautiful and unfortunately very relatable. I've been a part of a few gallery shows and they have always left me feeling unmoored. I think the secret is to focus on the work and ignore all the rest. Lord knows I've never been able to do that myself.
Congrats on the show! You deserve the recognition.
Thanks Mark! Always great to hear from you! I’ve always been good at focusing on the work more than anything, but also I never thought I’d have work in a gallery. It’s easy to lose sight of things unconsciously. To have knowingly shifted your gaze from the process to the prize. The benefit for me here is the clear confirmation that nothing will ever satisfy as much as teh work. Thanks Man! i appreciate you!
I so relate to the piece and your experience. I too have dealt with clinical depression for decades and somehow I've kept moving, showing up for the most part, one foot in front of the other; it's exhausting but it's kept me above ground. Your work is simply gorgeous and courageous. I've had that feeling of having something published and then not feeling anything about it. I like what someone said about "post-artum depression." Or maybe I have trouble really taking it in. Or the creating is more exciting, more about the here and now. Or a bit of all of it.
Thanks so much LeeAnn! The “post-artum depression” really does hit the nail right on the head doesn’t it? You bring up a great point, maybe it is a kind of short-sightedness, the inability to really take in the moment, to really see it. But, what resonates most is what you said about the excitement of creating. The making is what I love most. I’m not sentimental about a piece once it’s finished. When I collage is completed the only thinking about is teh collage I’m going to make next. The piece of working hanging on a wall in a gallery is work I’ve already moved on from. Thanks again!
I respect your openness, Duane, and the way you’re not afraid to look at things in such a wide awake and self-aware way. Whenever you describe your art practice it always seems like some form of meditation. And I guess I wonder if the work has already been done—on you and in you/-when the piece is complete. maybe then it’s for someone else at that point. A gift.
“Do your work, then step away. The only path to serenity.”
Much appreciated Ann! Creativity has always been the only thing that can help me explain myself to me. But, it only does that if I'm open, if I'm honest, if I'm as aware and awake as I can be. My creative process is definitely a meditative practice. It's attention and observation. It's watching what arises within me as things shift and shape and move. Seeing the way what changes on the page might change something within me. I think you're right, I think you've gotten at something I haven't quite considered, that when I finish a piece, the piece has finished with me. It's completed it's task, ushered me as far as it could, prepared me to start the next piece. Thanks for that!
“Ushered” 🙌 I love the sweet guidance in that. And then the Art you make can have a new life to do something good for the next person who receives it.
I know an established local artist who makes pottery. And sometimes she sells her pottery “seconds” at a discounted price—but she will never say what she thinks is “wrong” with it. She wants each person just to look at the piece and see it for what it is to them. I’ve bought several of her pottery “seconds” like this and I think they’re beautiful.
Love her approach! There’s something so compassionate about it. The recognition that if the work isn’t what she wanted or wasn’t what she thought it would be the issue is her own view and not in the tangibility of the work.
I'm sorry you didn't feel anything. You are defiantly an artist and a good one, both in your art and written word. I liked the an unsettled mind piece, and glad you are still putting your work out there.
Thanks for your support and thanks for reading. It was/is discouraging, but art has a way of showing us things that we didn’t notice before, things we’ve never seen, or things we’ve chosen not to. I rely on art to help confront truths, even and perhaps especially when those truths are uncomfortable to be close to. I’m still pondering the experience, and while it’s laced with an explicit melancholy, I can’t help but think that there’s an insight here. There’s something here that I needed…
Much appreciated. I've never really been much of an optimist. Despite my best intentions, I've reflexively leaned towards cynicism and pessimistic tendencies, but when I look at things and examine them closely, I do my best to leave enough space for hoping.
I love your honesty and vulnerability here. I've been showing art for a long time, so I'm very familiar with the feeling you describe after seeing your work in a gallery. One of my friends calls it "post-artum depression". I think it's a kind of letdown of energy after all the effort of making art and getting it out into the world. It's a bit of an empty feeling, of "what now?" You are not alone! Thanks for sharing your art and yourself, and keep going.
“post-artum depression” - Yes! That’s exactly it! Can’t believe how perfectly that encapsulates it! Thanks so much for that!
Wow Duane, what a burden you've had to carry, but what grace and courage. I'm blown away. Your writing is as good and as insightful as your art. Beautiful in fact.
You are one of these people with many talents. Love the art included in this post, you have a gift, keep going!! I'd love to see this type of art in more schools, cafes, houses etc
What has been your burden has yielded much beauty. Pain into beauty is part of my life's purpose I sense. I've been scribbling things on truth lately, and contrasting light. Really like what you've said here on truth. Powerful.
Thank you. It’s easy to appear graceful and courageous when you can craft the story on paper. Those closest to me can attest to the ugliness, the wallowing, and the rage. Unfortunately, they’ve not only seen it but have been victims to it. It’s crumble relationships and squander opportunities. I have not been poised so much as resolved. But that too, is no small thing.
“truth and contrasting light! – Love that! I can’t wait to see where that leads!
I'm sure you've heard all of this a 1000 times so I'll try to say it as it comes. Maybe what you describe as ugliness, wallow and rage is really honesty about your pain. You feel life so sensitively, so rawly and the cost is the pain you suffer. Susan Mc Mahon wrote a piece I saw today, I'll try to link below but the bit that stood out was
'It is the excavation of buried truths
that ultimately set us free,
but first we must break open
for the light to get in and illuminate
what sleeps in the heart
There's so much honesty in your writing Duane and I'll guess your living too. Most people won't feel life as you do, won't wrestle and bear witness to their life like you do. They might not show their cracks, but some don't really live. Or create beauty as you do.
Don't ever stop creating, it's your life's purpose. Your gift shines so bright.
Her full poem.
https://open.substack.com/pub/susanmcmahon/p/from-there-to-here?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=46rss
"but first we must break open" - so deeply resonant.
Kierkegaard said that a poet is "An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon'". It is the task of the artists to break open, to shatter, to explode, to turn it into a song, and to invite other to sing along.
thanks for all the great pieces today!
Oh wow, that quote is a framer!!
Thank you Duane. What a beautiful response. I'm currently singing my life asunder. With some caution, but less and less it feels.
"singing my life asunder" - So well said!! Save that line! I'll gladly sing along!
Something time has taught me... Sometimes it's the process of creation and not the result that is the truly valuable part.
It’s something that I’ve believed intellectually for a long time, but the longer I’m at this the more I’ve started to believe it in my bones.
Finding joy in your art is the highest level of energy you can bring to yourself
That’s becoming more and more clear to me. thanks so much Elizabeth!
I wrote about how I discovered the importance of joy in my “summer of fun” post. I’m trying to lean into that
“the importance of Joy” - love that! I’ll have to check that out!
Yes! I hear you about creativity as a way of coping - I use it that way too!! Congratulations on having so much good artwork completed!! That's the most important part. Congratulations on the gallery exhibit too of course - but the work is the thing IMHO. I've been exhibiting in galleries for over 25 years and that feeling you spoke of "feeling nothing" is in my experience a normal even "good" thing - It works best for me when I don't have expectations. When it's enough to have done the work itself and then to have shared it with others is a bonus, the cherry on the cupcake.
Just keep going. That's the main thing.
Thanks so much Sue! I really appreciate you taking the time to read! It’s proving to be a really common feeling for many artists. I assumed that there was no way I was the only one having that experience, and it was that curiosity, that made me want to write about it. It seemed like something worth having a conversation about. Something worth discussing. One that would beneficial for us to have together. It’s one thing to say that the work is the most important thing, that its the only part that really matters, but when you are existentially confronted with the truth of it in an experiential way, it’s clear confirmation. Thanks again!
You're welcome! And thank you for writing! I agree, we're in this creative life together and the more we realize that we have in common the stronger we can be. Yes, gotta love that real-life confirmation of sayings like "the work is the thing"!! "Just. Keep. Going." is another one of those sayings worth writing off and thumbtacking to an often viewed surface in ones art making area or writing on the bathroom mirror or tattooing on ones wrist - whatever keeps you going. 😉
I wanted to catch up on your letters for a while and I finally got a chance to sit down and read this one. I hope to read them all and be caught up by the end of the week.
I am so glad you are on Substack and I came across your beautiful work. I love your collages! They speak to me. I also love your honesty and vulnerability. I relate to so much that you are saying. As someone who is highly sensitive and has struggled with depression and anxiety her whole life, I always appreciate when people are open about their struggles and thoughts.
I think it is such a gift to express oneself through words and images. I truly believe that the most important gift as an artist is to create connection with others, honest connections. That to me is success.
I also relate to your feelings about seeing your images in a gallery. As someone who has had her work exhibited in many places, I have always been surprised about how fleeting the excitement about it is and how it ultimately didn‘t mean to me that much after all. It‘s weird and something I still can‘t quite explain.
But when someone writes to me letting me know that they connected with a particular image or they were inspired by an image and it touched them deeply, those words always stick with me and bring me a deep sense of joy and meaning.
You are a a true artist! No doubt!
Thank you for your creativity and sharing it with the world!
Thank you so much for such heart felt reply! I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one who has had this experience. That’s one of teh main reasons I decided to talk about it. I almost didn’t. I felt like I would sound ungrateful or melodramatic. But i though that perhaps there were others who had felt this way to but were also hesitant to talk about it. It’s easy to talk about goals and ambitions. It’s easy to talk about progress and practice and teh wins. But its much more difficult to discuss the lets downs and disappointments, especially in relation to teh things we achieve. It’s hard to talk about that but we need to. Thanks again for reading!
I came to collage because of a chronic illness that forces me to take a break from time to time, and it is there, in those stages of recovery, when creativity becomes a turning point, a lifeline. And the most important thing is not the final result, the hanging work, but the satisfaction and calm of the process.
creativity as a turning point with the stages of recovery - that is so beautiful!
"the calm of the process" - Yes! It's easy for me to lose sight of this, but this has always been teh most vital part of art making for me. The quiet qualities of the movements. The meditative qualities of watching and responding, witnessing something come to life and take shape.
Thanks so much for this!
I relate to all of this so much! For me, that blank feeling of “nothing” is usually a kind of dissociating from many many feelings, often conflicting. Also I have never found any career milestone to be as satisfying as I imagined! I’ve come to think that the true value of these sorts of achievements is just the permission or support to keep on making art — the process more than the product, in other words. The main thing is to just to keep going. :)
Thanks for this Alison! "that blank feeling of 'nothing'" - the conflict of overwhelming feelings - the detachment that happens reactionarily - You've summarized it perfectly. i think you're absolutely right, underneath the dissatisfaction, underneath the disenchantment and heartbreak is a kind of liberation. if it doesn't matter. if it's inconsequential, if it makes no difference ultimately, then you're free to do anything creatively. There are no consequences for following any artistic impulse for chasing any creative curiosity. If there's nothing to gain, then that means there's also nothing to lose. Thanks again for chiming in! I appreciate it!
Beautiful and unfortunately very relatable. I've been a part of a few gallery shows and they have always left me feeling unmoored. I think the secret is to focus on the work and ignore all the rest. Lord knows I've never been able to do that myself.
Congrats on the show! You deserve the recognition.
Thanks Mark! Always great to hear from you! I’ve always been good at focusing on the work more than anything, but also I never thought I’d have work in a gallery. It’s easy to lose sight of things unconsciously. To have knowingly shifted your gaze from the process to the prize. The benefit for me here is the clear confirmation that nothing will ever satisfy as much as teh work. Thanks Man! i appreciate you!
I so relate to the piece and your experience. I too have dealt with clinical depression for decades and somehow I've kept moving, showing up for the most part, one foot in front of the other; it's exhausting but it's kept me above ground. Your work is simply gorgeous and courageous. I've had that feeling of having something published and then not feeling anything about it. I like what someone said about "post-artum depression." Or maybe I have trouble really taking it in. Or the creating is more exciting, more about the here and now. Or a bit of all of it.
Thanks so much LeeAnn! The “post-artum depression” really does hit the nail right on the head doesn’t it? You bring up a great point, maybe it is a kind of short-sightedness, the inability to really take in the moment, to really see it. But, what resonates most is what you said about the excitement of creating. The making is what I love most. I’m not sentimental about a piece once it’s finished. When I collage is completed the only thinking about is teh collage I’m going to make next. The piece of working hanging on a wall in a gallery is work I’ve already moved on from. Thanks again!
Focusing on the next piece of work—that’s artistic freedom!
That’s a discipline that doesn’t come naturally to me.
That may be the ONLY part of the discipline that does come naturally to me, lol!
I respect your openness, Duane, and the way you’re not afraid to look at things in such a wide awake and self-aware way. Whenever you describe your art practice it always seems like some form of meditation. And I guess I wonder if the work has already been done—on you and in you/-when the piece is complete. maybe then it’s for someone else at that point. A gift.
“Do your work, then step away. The only path to serenity.”
Much appreciated Ann! Creativity has always been the only thing that can help me explain myself to me. But, it only does that if I'm open, if I'm honest, if I'm as aware and awake as I can be. My creative process is definitely a meditative practice. It's attention and observation. It's watching what arises within me as things shift and shape and move. Seeing the way what changes on the page might change something within me. I think you're right, I think you've gotten at something I haven't quite considered, that when I finish a piece, the piece has finished with me. It's completed it's task, ushered me as far as it could, prepared me to start the next piece. Thanks for that!
“Ushered” 🙌 I love the sweet guidance in that. And then the Art you make can have a new life to do something good for the next person who receives it.
I know an established local artist who makes pottery. And sometimes she sells her pottery “seconds” at a discounted price—but she will never say what she thinks is “wrong” with it. She wants each person just to look at the piece and see it for what it is to them. I’ve bought several of her pottery “seconds” like this and I think they’re beautiful.
Love her approach! There’s something so compassionate about it. The recognition that if the work isn’t what she wanted or wasn’t what she thought it would be the issue is her own view and not in the tangibility of the work.
I'm sorry you didn't feel anything. You are defiantly an artist and a good one, both in your art and written word. I liked the an unsettled mind piece, and glad you are still putting your work out there.
Thanks for your support and thanks for reading. It was/is discouraging, but art has a way of showing us things that we didn’t notice before, things we’ve never seen, or things we’ve chosen not to. I rely on art to help confront truths, even and perhaps especially when those truths are uncomfortable to be close to. I’m still pondering the experience, and while it’s laced with an explicit melancholy, I can’t help but think that there’s an insight here. There’s something here that I needed…
Such a brilliant way of looking at the creative process, I’d never really considered it like that. I hope you find the insight you needed.
Much appreciated. I've never really been much of an optimist. Despite my best intentions, I've reflexively leaned towards cynicism and pessimistic tendencies, but when I look at things and examine them closely, I do my best to leave enough space for hoping.