It's been about six months since I started my day job doing commercial art for my local Trader Joe's. In that time I've done a huge amount of work for them — everything from more than a hundred reproducible decorative price tags, to small advertising signs for wine and individual products, to large "billboards" advertising whole sections of the store. I've had a lot of fun doing this work, and I continue to enjoy it. There's always something new to do and invent. (Not to mention the free sample goodies and wine-tasting.)

But (there's always a "but") for the last four months, I haven't done a single piece of "original" work for myself. Not only have I not had the time, I haven't been able to decide what to do. Viewing the "Art Renewal" neo-retro art only brought back this feeling of indecision. I used to run my life by the deadlines of clients and the exhibits I would have at science fiction conventions. Now I have largely scaled back my science fiction convention shows, and for now I have only a couple of private clients. The money from the day job gives me more than I made doing freelance art, most of the time, and this should allow me to do what I want to do artistically. I can work around the time constraints, but it's the idea constraints that are currently troubling me.

And of course there's that other matter I've been attending to, that is, mathematics and science. Trigonometry, after these last months where I was stuck in the labyrinth of trigonometric identities, continues to be a struggle. It's not that I can't do the work once I've learned it, it's that I am faced with a diffuse cloud of information, little of it connected with material reality. I look in different books, and it doesn't fit together. It's not like the solid, progressing architecture of algebra and geometry; in trig, it seems one section doesn't follow logically into the next, and one book describes a process (for instance, the plotting of amplitude, period, and phase of a sine curve) in quite different terms from another. The trigonometric equations which are my next subject just show up without any explanation; they are there to solve, like words that make grammatical sense in a language which I don't understand. I patiently learn the formulas and solve the problems, after all, that's what I'm here for, to solve problems.

Or is that what I'm here for? When I read that some of the neo-retro artists believe that their art is a "calling from God," I'm embarrassed. No matter what my religious beliefs, I think that attributing your talent and artistic output to God is a sure way to embarrass God and possibly yourself as well. What if your art is bad? Is God well-served by bad art? And even more confusing is that some scientists refer to their work as a "calling," even though they don't believe in a God or any entity which would do the calling. They are not in it for money or fame, they're in it because they have some inner need to do the work.

I grew up among artists who were like that. Even if their work is never shown and never recognized in public, they keep doing it, because they have an inner, perhaps inborn, need to make paintings or music. I, however, am more pragmatic, and probably more vulgar as well; I need to feel that my art connects and communicates with a wider public than just a few friends. I am not a "pure" artist who creates without thinking of recognition or sales. At the moment, I am uncertain whether I should do work which is designed to be showable and sellable, whether to known patrons or a known audience. Or should I do pieces which are more esoteric but more in keeping with what I am thinking about math, geometry, and physics?

It is not enough, as some friends who think they are encouraging me say, to "just do it." And I am sick of the other ones who offer the platitudes of "one to pay the bills, one to feed the soul." I am not the kind of artist who just sits down and creates stuff on the spot. Doing a major painting for me is like waging a campaign, or perhaps running an elaborate experiment. It takes planning, assembly of materials and references, logistics, and lots of time. I am a very unspontaneous artist. Not that I don't do quick sketches, preliminary drawings, and on-site notes, but all of those are subordinate to the "big picture." "Just do it" or "feeding the soul" will tie up months of my time. It had better be a good "it" that I do.

My commercial art communicates and entertains, but is also ephemeral. Even my best signs for Trader Joe's are only up for a few months, after which they go out of date and are removed, often painted over for another sign. I photograph them all for my archives, but their purpose is gone and they are history. The art that I am beginning to miss doing is the work that I intend to last beyond my lifetime, the work that will carry on the values and qualities and information which I personally stand for. Is that a "calling?"

The same goes for mathematics and science. No matter how confused I get, I never want to give up. There is always something more that beckons to me. In this case, it is the looming wall of calculus. Is math/science a "calling" for me as well? Can one get an additional "calling" late in life, or is everything set out for you at birth and in childhood, by the genetic and environmental lottery? A physicist acquaintance of mine once said to me that he would become depressed and disoriented if he were not able to do physics. Is he "called" to do physics? Am I? What is calling to me, if anything, and how much responsibility do I have to it?

Posted at 3:00 am | link