What You Sacrifice For Your Art


Here's a pic of the WIP I'm working from for my latest major - working title 'Grim Fairy'.

With this kind of work, there are certain times when you choose to give up the ordinary pursuits in life... other artists know what I'm talking about - the kinds of things people normally find intriguing and somehow fascinating, like visiting different places just to be somewhere else, see something else, to be surrounded by a different environment.
I call it spectating, the idea of going to 'see' something, not interact with it or be engaged with it.
I've often discussed the need to disengage from the easel or the drawing board in order to go and do something else, to inspire the muse and restructure the senses. Personally, I find little in spectating - there's no emotional response to a building or a field or a park unless I'm riding the elevator or running through the grass pretending to be William Wallace (hmm, haven't done that in a while - no kilt!)
When I'm at the cafe, I'm working - either on a WIP or a minor, or scratching out ideas, it's fascinating the number of people who say to me, why don't you go see this place, that place, anywhere but where you are now, doing what you're doing?
My understanding of this is that most people find the idea of sitting still and actually creating either dull, boring or without life. Yet when they see the result, they're astonished by the detail, the layering, the thought and imagination in it.... For them, the need to move and be somewhere else all the time, experiencing life in the flesh is the journey. For me, the journey is in the process, the detail, the layering, the thought and imagination..... and the willingness to sit still in order to achieve it.