If it sells, it ain't art...

Several years ago my work was featured on an NPR program produced by Spokane Public Radio. The show entitled "Art A La Carte" showcased various western talents and on this particular episode the host interviewed a well known local artist.

I've always remembered this artist's statement. "If it sells, it ain't art."

My mother is an extraordinarily talented artist. And, she can take great comfort in knowing that her work isn't selling.

Mom enjoys her craft, toiling for hours in her Federal Way, Washington Studio, listening to Christian praise worship tapes and embracing her solitary and introverted dance with brush, paint, and subject-either of canvas or handcrafted wooden furniture. Over the years, she's taught in community colleges, at seminars, and she's even seen her work featured in newspapers and on the cover of magazines.

My father is not an artist. He does not understand the concept of "if it's art, it doesn't sell".

Sometimes his impatience is very frustrating. Frustrating for his artist wife, who doesn't have the motivation to paint on demand, and sometimes to his writer son-your's truly, who doesn't have the ability to crank out best sellers on demand. My father laments our financial stagnation. He doesn't understand how we can live with the lack of compensation.

For the record, I have produced beautiful art work in the past-pen and ink drawings but I gave these talents up for the most part when my high school class voted me "most likely to be doing portraits on street corners at forty". People still save my early work because they, like my father, love financial reward. They'd tell me that someday I'd be famous and whatever I'd produced for them would be "worth something." Funny how it takes fame to make a beloved work produced under the glare of devotion, "worth something."

Instead of drawing street corner portraits, post high school, I pursued first college, then trucking, then aviation, and throughout all of this, I've continued writing. And, speaking of those ever kind West Albany High Bulldogs, in another vote my class named me most creative. Another death sentence. Unfortunately in the art world, "most creative" means you probably won't be showing up to your twentieth class reunion driving a new porche. In fact, chances are, if your still stubbornly trying to do "art" by the time the class reunion rolls around, there is a good chance you will arrive courtesy of the back of a tow truck. As a writer, I've learned that no matter how loved your work, whether literary or artistic, this is not the easiest pathway to make bank.

My mother has learned these lessons as well. I think my mom and I share this whole business is up, sales are down, curse. My last boyfriend was obsessed with this idea of financial success as the only way to measure a person's value. I'd never dealt with the issue of success in such a confrontational way. Artsy people don't really understand this world view, and for sure we Aquarians can't descend from the clouds long enough to understand the grim reality of something so petty as our collapsing checking account. As I struggled to defend my worth to the boyfriend, I could point to the fact that my writing received over ten million hits, that I'd been published, and achieved many goals, but without a six figure income to back it up, my value in his eyes was zero. As I crashed into my fortieth birthday in January, I discovered that I'd began to believe him-that my life only had value if I met another person's definition of success with the appropriate dollar signs attached. I fought off serious depression and beat myself up relentlessly because I could not meet these expectations.

Recently my father's denial of his situation is under a similar assault. He reckons with serious slippage as once again my parents revisit the whole productivity quota issue. My father is not yet to the point of acceptance, nor has he embraced the truth that he has married and borne unto him a blessed curse.

On one hand he revels in both his wife and his son's creativity. Then he light trips into a familiar rendition of "Show me the money." I sometimes wonder why impatient people would consider linking up with us artistic and creative types. It's like they must enjoy pulling out their hair, because the more our productivity slips, our motivation declines, the less effective that not so subtle pressure is to produce more, produce better work, and produce things that sell.

Instead we artistic types get depressed. Which inspires individuals like my father to listen to a lot of right wing talk radio so they have somewhere to vent their anger about our lack of productivity and compensation. Because artists, writers, and other creative types are really good at getting depressed, I believe many artists are probably even better a depression than their craft. As a result of this, their "Show Me the Money" type partners are really good at listening to talk radio. It's the ying yang of life in a sorta Lutheran household with a sorta perfected unsolvable problem heaped with an extra helping of unrealistic quantum physics and possibility thinking.

But, back to this art bit. I think that sometimes an artist, through their work, eventually finds light, a pathway to serenity, or the exact combination of drugs that will make their suicide way less messy to clean up. Art, the written word, and the imagination of the playwrites, allows us "most creative types" to ask in the midst of our solitary reasoning, painful and difficult questions. Why do people marry people who will drive them crazy? Why is lasting inspiration and joy so allusive in life? Why are the words to describe despair so difficult to find? Why is this paint sticking to everything but the canvas?

Recently my mother sold a piece she'd produced for over four figures to a Las Vegas art collector. It was her largest sale to date. My father quit listening to talk radio for a whole week. Mom didn't seem so depressed. Seattle was in the midst of a very long drought and it was sunny each and every day for months on end. My mom started painting again. Tentative, working to complete a couple works.

Yet I don't believe that sale was really her motivation. It's the process. Most artists I know work in bits and spurts. They rally, as if nearing a finish line and then once a piece is finished they collapse all spent and sweaty and stinky. Exhausted and unmotivated, rarely is completion all that satiating. Its all about the process not the finished product.

This is where my father's serenity is most challenged. Process, the whole dance of brush and paint across virgin surface has a downside. Many times process does not equal completion.

Indeed, my mother is the proud owner of the largest collection of unfinished work on this, the western side of the Cascades. Not only is her sales volume not likely to turn many heads in the local "who's who among the who's selling art" scene, but the market for partially painted pieces is very down this year. This type of creativity is usually referred to as a work "in progress."

If you think that my father has difficulty embracing low sales figures, well imagine the abandon my mother's large collection of unfinished pieces inspires. Half finished canvases and barely started painted furniture fills my mother's studio. This translates into a household that is increasingly also filled with the sound of talk radio. Very loud talk radio. My parent's garage has become a furniture warehouse. A sacred place of towering raw pine and alder pieces, furniture yet unstarted, that will take my mother several lifetimes to complete. To my father, this reality of unfinished production represents an abyss from which not even talk radio provides refuge. But he turns up the volume anyway.

With the passing of my grandmother, I've been spending a lot of time navigating the waters of "If it sells, it ain't art." I've spent way too much time in Federal Way, listening as my parents continue their dance. My mother's collection of unfinished work gathers dust, and I the writer sit at her computer, left sorting through all these uncomfortable themes of what gives our lives meaning, how do we measure success, and is it possible to concentrate enough to finish this piece under the assault of Rush Limbaugh at thirty million decibels.

Life in Federal Way can represent a very unhappy balance at times. The worst of all things ying and yang and incompatibility. The measure of my hold on serenity and my release of all things Lutheran is often tenuous. Sadly, it's the very best environment I could ever find to struggle through my craft, to write like I mean it.

All the while knowing with every key stroke and every completed word, it's probably not going to sell.

Cherilyn Anderson's work can be accessed by contacting her directly at Cheri's Folk Art Collectibles at ALACAA@msn.com My parents have a digital camera. My father would be happy to take pictures of any of her completed work, and sell it for a very reasonable price.