Scott, Focus!

The title to this post, like that of the last, is a direct quotation from a friend. In this case, from my lovely wife peajay. I hear it with alarming frequency, as I have something of a short attention span, and a tendency to drift. This applies to all areas of my life, not least my tentative art career.

I'll give you an example. Take a look here: Lichen, by Todd Camplin. Todd Camplin is a somewhat more advanced denizen of the University of North Texas' College of Visual Arts and Design, and his own blog says, "I am an artist that makes works based on peoples signatures. I also like to abstract text to create images."

I dream of that level of specificity. Over the past three years at the college, I've narrowed down somewhat from "whatever I feel like" to "didactic and overtly political work about gender that only I could possibly begin to understand, much less explain" to "figurative work" to "traditional figurative painting done from life as much as possible, with the amplification of my own imagination and/or photographic reference". This feels scattered and incomplete. Does an artist need a motive or brand? Do you have to appreciate the direction your work seems to be taking you?

Really I want what Kiki Smith described in her Art21 documentary. Which was basically along the lines of, "Yeah, I annoy the galleries, because sometimes I'll do a big series of paintings, then I'll move on to bronze casting, or want to do some tiny intimate portraits... and sometimes it sells, and sometimes it doesn't." This is obviously not a direct quote. It boiled down to, "I work how and when I please, and there's not necessarily a unifying medium or aesthetic." And I might be able to get away with that, too, if I had her father's connections.

Presently, I've got a dog, a cat, a mortgage, a full-time job, and a wife I like and like to be around. It seems difficult to make the time for a very limited, focused body of work centered on painting, when what I want is to paint, build, collage, quilt, sew, film, photograph... whatever I happen to feel like at the time. Isn't the fact that I did something a defining connection, holding it all together?

That is, I would love to have a defined focus as Mr. Camplin appears to... but with every one thing that I choose to do, I tend to get cranky and irritable at the realization that there are a dozen other things that I'm not doing. My list of "wouldn't-it-be-cool" projects is increasing at an order of magnitude faster than my collection of completed work.