Take a look in any kindergarten. There’s nothing those kids can’t do. Paint? Sure. Splash, dash, done, what do you think this is? Singing? How loud? Music? Clap, clap. Acting? Dress me up and let my imagination run. Ceramics? Play-Doh will do it. Kinder is all-in art. Our creative capacities come naturally to us, untrained and unrestrained. There we start. Artists, the lot of us.
The filtering starts in primary school, self-imposed in some cases, when we develop degrees of self-consciousness as we take a look at what others are doing and start to measure ourselves by their standards. And at times, there’s no choice at all. The Song Room research tells us that about 400,000 Australian children have no arts classes in their schools. That’s a big crack to slip through. By the time they reach high school, many kids have lost the energy or the interest that they had only a few short years before.
All secondary schools will provide art of some kind as a fraction of the curriculum in at least the first two years. After that, with art subjects relegated to electives outside of the academic core of English, maths, sciences and usually health or sport, a student may never have any formal training in art ever again. Of the 72,000 students who sat for the Higher School Certificate in NSW in 2011, just short of 10,000 chose Visual Art as a subject. That’s down to 14% of students who think that one kind of art at least is still important to them personally or professionally. Of that 10,000, 200 are selected for the annual ArtExpress exhibition of student work. You do the math on that one.
Again, looking at the NSW HSC figures, just over 6,000 students studied at least one unit of music, nearly 5,000 studied Drama but only 850 took dance as a subject. Just over 2,300 studied Textiles and Design and 3,400 studied Design and Technology. And that is the bundle of arts subjects in the senior exams in Australia’s most populous state. You can see where this is going.
Let’s be generous and say that from a figure of 100% of children happy to splash some paint on paper or join in imaginative play, by the time they finish high school only 10% still engage in the creative life. And even then it’s not that simple. If you choose something strenuous like dance or circus arts, chances are you won’t have a career as long as a visual artist might. Lucian Freud was outlived by an unfinished canvas, still active until his very last days past the age of 88.
Very few get to make it as Freud did on their terms. He is the exception, but to many he is the dream. That is how we imagine an artist’s life should run and that’s where we say stop. Think of an inverted pyramid. It all starts at a broad base and ends at a single point. In Australia, if there were 1,000 people at the top of that inverted pyramid, that funnels down to just two at the pointy end. Somewhere along the way we lose it. The attrition rate is almost extinctive. The sheer weight of numbers says either we will never make it no matter how much we try or how long we persist, or it’s not working for us anymore and it’s time to try something else. That’s the reality. That’s the hard figures. J.K. Rowling knows a bit about struggle and success. She simply says, “it is our choices … that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
Being aware that at some point most of us will surely have to face that choice is part of the life of being an artist. It’s the world most of the 44,000 working artists in Australia live in. That’s the size of Port Macquarie on the NSW central coast. All of the people in Australia could have been artists but the ones who did could fit into one town. Most of them do something else as well because their earnings from their art aren’t enough to live on. Less than a thousand will do really well. That’s the rich part of town.
And even then success is no guarantee of a happy ending. Painters like Mark Rothko and the German expressionist Ernst Kirchner took their lives. So did photographer Diane Arbus. Writers seem especially susceptible to angst and anguish. A morbid honour roll would list Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, David Foster Wallace and even the whimsical Richard Brautigan among them. Musicians are no different, including, bizarrely, The Singing Nun, who had a hit with Dominique in 1963.
Her story is instructive. After that one and only hit, she left the convent in 1967 to pursue a failed career. Complications with rights that weren’t hers, royalties she never got, taxes on royalties she never got that she couldn’t pay because of the royalties she never got, a desperate disco version of Dominique with synthesizers in 1982, all led to an early death in 1985. Almost 30 years of missteps were signposts and warning signals she didn’t see.
Don’t be The Singing Nun. See the signs. Heed the warnings. What began as a passion can become an obsession that tips dangerously into an addiction. Never get that desperate, unless you’re Charles Bukowski, who can stare down the hard choices. Unless you can live these words from Factotum, truly live these words, make your choices and have a Plan B:
If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery – isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.
