Mountains

On the unfettered human mind

The other day I was discussing with another Substacker the problem of how to sustain life as an artist for the long term. He expressed concern that the advent of AI will take the low-stakes writing and music composition jobs that many artists use to generate income. What will artists do when those jobs are gone? he asks.

My response was that they will simply find another way to make money that allows them to keep making art.

This led to a discussion of whether having plenty of studio time necessarily results in better art. He seemed to think it did. I suggested that cultural history would show otherwise. Think of the breakthrough works by any twentieth or twenty-first century artist you care to name. Those works were most likely produced when the artist was struggling to make ends meet and making work in the interstices.

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Another way to solve this problem is to make art while you are doing your income-generating work. Here is a little example of that. My first money gig as an artist was teaching art to elementary school children. An itinerant teacher, each week I traveled to three different elementary schools in rural Polk County, North Carolina, offering classes to 500 children –yes, 500 children each week. On a few of those days I enlisted my young charges to help me explore a multitude of ideas: looking, attention, imagination, graphic representation versus graphic power, innocence versus experience. I did this by simply giving each of them a small piece of newsprint and asking them to make a drawing.

On this particular day, April 26––today’s date, but in 1978, I asked them to draw the mountain outside our classroom window. A few days later I asked a different class to draw a tree, another the sun, then simply “a line,” and finally “draw a picture of God.”

The results were fun, surprising, delightful, and an altogether beautiful portrait of the young human mind. Andy, Antwand, Alicia, Mitchell and all the others here that are still with us are now 52 or 53 years old.

These works have never been shown. In fact, they have virtually never been seen. Please share this post to help me celebrate the beauty inherent in every new generation.