“Uncommissioned–The Self Made Artist” reflects on what it means to build an identity as an artist, and what inspires and directs the art that we create as young people today.
At five, I fisted my first paintbrush so hard it left red streaks on my babycarrot fingers. I jabbed at the canvas, which my mom had propped up on a chair in the backyard, with angerless anger and strengthless strength, pressing strokes of green goop into the white fibers and letting my mom call me an artist. Around the world, thousands of children pressed watercolor-kit paintbrushes onto their own clean canvases, and thousands of tiny artists lit up in the matter of seconds, spilled and scattered across a map.
The reason why this happened is, of course, that we did not know that everything had already been done. We all did things for the first time and believed we were the only creators. All that was new to us was new to the universe. We were aware of nothing beyond ourselves. The more we aged, the more our art slipped through our fingers and fell into a puddle of what already existed. That swarm of fluttering little artists that lit up the world like fireflies dropped down into a sad little pile of dead bugs. We’d refuse to call ourselves artists ever again.
According to the Bible, “there’s nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). When I was five there was no “God,” no “Creator of the Universe,” just a big guy in the sky; and there was no Sun, just a yellow lightbulb that the big guy would switch on day in, day out. Or maybe there wasn’t a big guy at all — it did not really matter to me so long as the lights were on in the morning. And there certainly was no Bible: no text was more true than another, and every word was just letters thrown in a pile like the bouquets of daisies I picked in my mother’s garden. Pretty words, long words, short words. All words.
This summer, I convinced my parents to let me spend four weeks writing in Paris under the pretense of acquiring credits for the English major. I preferred not to tell them that really I’d been facing a sort of mid-Yale crisis that shoved me into a corner of self-loathing and grief for my former ambition, since I was not a published author at the age of 19. It was all going to be okay, though, since I would spend the whole month writing a novel. Classes were held a few minutes walk away from all the classically “writerly” spots in the city—meaning everywhere Hemingway had even most-casually mentioned in A Moveable Feast.
Every afternoon I sat on the spikey stones of the Seine’s riverwalk, cursing Ernest Hemingway. I had picked the spot where air circulated the most to dilute the acrid smell of piss, and as far away as I could from the place where my friend’s phone and wallet had been stolen. I returned there every day, with the stench-filled hopes of discovering whatever stimulated Hemingway tucked between the cobblestones of the riverwalk and taking it home with me.
“But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.”
At the edge of the river, I waited for Paris to whisper the right words in my ear. I watched cruise after cruise of shouting tourists surely make their way by. I solemnly fanned the empty pages of my notepad and looked at Notre Dame. From my spot I could see the tip that had burned down not too long ago. Paris is in constant competition with its past, and it’s losing
I wrote no novel on the Seine’s riverwalk this summer. It took some time for me to understand that Paris is not the city it was 100 years ago, and that, shockingly enough, I’m not Ernest Hemingway. Or Gertrude Stein, or any of the novelists that wrote entire books out of the sights and places I could not make a word out of.
It’s now impossible for me to separate my art from what’s been made before. While greatness is inspiring, the legacy I inhale in places like Yale or Paris is just as sure to sicken me (if not due to the inevitable comparison between my art and others’, then because of the smell of sewers). Growing and acquiring consciousness of the world prompts both essential reflections that feed my art and an anxiety that I should be telling certain stories over the ones I’m viscerally drawn to—to level with those I consider “great,” and most importantly, to be original. But in the effort to be so we lose touch with the meaning of the word “original”, and with the meaning of art itself. Maybe art was only art when we were five and we doodled lines because we liked it. But, then again, that art could hardly ever tell the complex stories of Hemingway and Stein.
It would be pleasant to create art in a sort of no-mans-land, where the stakes are low enough that we can make art without the burden of every word, stroke and shot determining the level of our abilities. These stakes are completely self-imposed by our own love of the work, and our desire to do our minds justice in practice. These stakes are what strip us of the title of artist. Michelangelo dared to let Adam’s finger just nearly touch God’s, branding humankind as a race of creators: everything we generate is divinely ours, and, in such, has never seen the light of day before.
