Oops, I did it again!

Sorry, sorry... I hope if you came here yesterday, on FRIDAY, when this blog is supposed to be published that you will return again today or later in the week to catch up on my life as an artist. I am going to blame this on the job again. That part time job! The one that is not supposed to interfere with my art brain, the one I can leave at the office, the one where I only work 20 hours a week with minimal responsibility. That job, well, it is not jiving with my art brain at all or my life.

Again, it is not a hard job or physically demanding or one that I take home with me. I am trying very hard to do well at it, to give it my best shot and I am doing okay and even getting along with my co-workers. It is just that it takes a different kind of energy to go to that kind of work. I know that I am lucky to have a job, lucky to have two! And as I am not a complainer, I try to focus on the positive and the good as much as I can in this world. However, I don't like setting an alarm and getting myself to my cubicle and I don't like the act of watching the clock tick and trying to just hang on for another hour or another 10 minutes and then clocking out and walking out the door like an escaped con. Free at last!

And I know I am responsible for my actions once I walk out that door, that I could walk right up the stairs to my studio and do my real job, but I don't. I am just so glad to be off work that I just sort of veg out until it is time to do it again. This is life for so many and in a way it is easier. Go to work, get off (feel elated), zone out, go to work, get paid (feel elated) and repeat. I have never been able to live this way. Never.

So, here I am trying to be a square peg in a round hole of society at work dreaming "if I could sell just my hourly rate of pay times my hours in art each week routinely and sometimes more so I could quit the job." Thinking, "I just need to get back in the right galleries, get a studio out of my house again, or just leave the region and go wherever so that I can do what I need to do to live my life how it is meant to be lived." I have already made so many choices to make my living affordable and my life as an artist manageable but yet in this economy it wasn't enough and now I have this job. "It's only temporary I say to myself. It won't last forever. Just a little while longer."

How many paintings have not been made as I make minimum wage, how many stories, poems, photographs and other creative pursuits have not been created by others as they toil away at their jobs. Why has our society been set up this way and why do we keep playing along? Why don't we set up barters and trades among artists and workers, why can't we pay with art, songs and poems? Society loves our cultural heritage as they celebrate and promote art and artists in our communities but the feel good support wanes and the financial support is not as readily available. Once again artists are expected to just join the rank and file and get a job while their passion fades to the background until hopefully for themselves and society they wake up to return to the only way of living they know...poverty be damned.

Until next week, please keep fighting. The world needs our art.