I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
Yesterday, I wrote that I was planning to apply to an art festival scheduled for later this summer. Last night I thought through what it would involve and decided against it.
I had a fantasy of what the festival would be like: meeting other artists, having interesting conversations with passers-by, hearing someone comment, “Ooooo, I love this one!”, getting people to sign up for my newsletter mailing list and receiving a gorgeous booklet of my Snow Bound project.
But when I found myself awake at 2 am last night I imagined the reality of it. I’d need to borrow or buy panels and even if I got ones that could fold down enough to fit into my car, they’d take up most of the room. Where would the paintings go? Maybe I would have to borrow a truck or rent a trailer.
And where was I going to stay overnight? That was another expense I hadn’t yet budgeted for. Realistically, how much money could I make this way? The goal wasn’t really to make money — not this first time out — but to connect with potential future collectors, so it would be ok if I simply invested in this and didn’t make money. But the ever-increasing budget for the project scared me. And as I walked through in my mind getting myself and all my things to a mountain town, it became less and less appealing.
Some thinkers, D.W. Winnicott and Iris Murdoch among them, have distinguished between fantasy and imagination. To Winnicott, fantasy is a defensive retreat into an inner world, whereas imagination reaches out from internal dreams to external reality. Murdoch shifts this focus from psychological development to moral philosophy. Murdoch thinks that fantasy arises from the laziness of the fat, relentless ego that interprets reality solely in terms of private desires. And she think of imagination as the ability to see the world as it truly is, especially the ability to see other people as they genuinely are.
So Winnicott developed this distinction in the context of psychological development, while Murdoch did the same but in the realm of moral and ethical philosophy.
Either way — fantasy for both of them is dysfunctional and turned inward while imagination confronts and acknowledges the real world.
I have too often reverted into fantasy in my life, but as I mature, it seems I am letting go of that. For example, I no longer fantasize that a romantic relationship will prove sustaining and engaging, knowing as I do that instead, I find them draining. They take away my independence and my ability to life as my self. As another example, while I do occasionally fantasize about moving to the hills to a multi-acre property where I can have a whole pack of foster dogs, my ability to imagine reality always stops me before I text my realtor and say, “Let’s go look at houses!”
so what to do about my art?
The idea of applying to festivals got me painting again, and I might even buy a new studio easel in support of that. That’s a good thing.
Any fantasies I’ve had of marketing and selling my art have not played out into reality. Showing art in juried group shows is unsatisfying because my own art is exhibited with other people’s, and there’s not a chance for my own concepts and aesthetics and manipulation of materials to be fully and intensively expressed. Marketing my art online doesn’t engage or excite me.
Every time I consider a new way of showing and marketing my work — juried group shows, online art marketplaces, art festivals — reality intrudes.
On the other hand, I do think I can imagine — not just fantasize about — sharing my writing work, with painting images alongside, in a way that is realistically successful. And here, by successful, I mean it is a practice I can continue indefinitely, enjoying its intrinsic rewards without some big emphasis on external validation, making money, or building a big audience. I don’t mean Achievement Society style success.
My unlived life
My fantasy of art festivals intertwines with my fantasy of the perfect romantic relationship. I imagine my partner and me driving up to a mountain town together, my tent and panels and paintings in tow (likely quite literally in tow). I imagine him helping me set up the booth, and “manning” it if I need to take a break. I imagine him helping me sell my art, and giving me support when I feel uncertain.
This is part of my unlived life, a kind of life I always thought I might get. I wasn’t so far from it given the sort of men I dated over the past fourteen years: men who loved to head to the mountains, men who were handy with the physical world (so could probably build me some panels rather than my having to buy them), men who were enthusiastic about my art and liked to be a part of its creating and promotion.
I miss those guys.
What I need to do is affirmatively choose this life: committed singlehood instead of pursuing the fantasy of a romantic live-in partnership, creating art because I love to create art and hang it in my own house (not try to get it onto someone else’s wall), living in a suburban golf course community right near Denver rather than buying a house in the hills and struggling with the difficulties that would entail.
Let me imagine for a few moments what a hassle it would be to move to a house in the hills. First, I’d have to shop for and choose one, going through the hell of negotiations with a seller. I’d have to sell this house. I’ve sold so many houses in my lifetime I’m well capable of doing it again but I don’t want to. I want my kids to have to sell this house, not me. Maybe the well for the house would run dry and I’d have to have a new one drilled. Getting insurance would be next-to-impossible because of fire danger. And, related to that, I’d have to do fire mitigation for the property. The house probably wouldn’t be everything I’d want so maybe I’d have to have it painted and the bathroom or kitchen renovated.
Ugh! That’s enough imagination to drive me away from that particular fantasy.
I could do the same imagination exercise for selling my art at an art festival or seeking a new manly man to drive with me to the mountains. It would result in the same conclusion: I like my life the way it is.
Now I just need to be careful of the fantasies that my ego devises that lead me away from reality.