Tools and Teachers and Artful Islands
I’ve never been to art school. I don’t have an MFA. I’m more or less self-taught. What does that tell you about me and my art?
Pretty much nothing, right?
But there is a good chance your brain made a few associations anyway. It’s okay. We can’t help it. In our culture, self-taught is a tad suspect. We’re very schooly in our assumptions, and we apply a lot of very schooly ideas to pretty much everything.
Especially to our Arful Selves.
Artists who come to their art outside of the academy, who don’t have certificates from art institutes or letters after their name, sometimes find themselves battling not just the vagaries of an artful life but the feeling that their art is somehow less legitimate than that of their lettered colleagues.
We look at glossy art magazines and doubt slips in. We read artist bios at galleries and in the front pages of literary journals, and confidence drains away. We look around at our paints, at the stacks of our homebrew cds, at the copies of our chapbooks, and feel a little foolish.
Maybe even fraudulent.
Definitely small.
Enter That Well-Meaning Voice
At some point what often happens is something like this: the well-meaning voice of assurance in our heads (you do have one of those, don’t you?) swoops in to coo and praise and tell us of course we’re artists. That real artists make art. That there is no other definition that matters.
And maybe we’re reassured, and pick up the pen or the brush and get busy.
But maybe doubt persists.
And maybe it persists because that well-meaning voice has interrupted a dialogue that needs to occur in order for us to understand what it is we’re doing, and why.
Tools and Teachers
One great benefit of attending any kind of art institute or MFA program is that it puts the tools of our craft in our hands and puts us in the company of instructors skilled in the use of those tools. It also provides us with the initial makings of a collegial tribe, a community, a network.
Fortunately for those of us who have pursued an artful life outside of academia, tools and teachers and colleagues are not the sole province of school. Which is good news, because tools and teachers and colleagues are instrumental to the development of an artful life.
Unfortunately, that well-meaning voice of assurance can sometimes short-circuit that development.
Well-Meaning… and a Little Bit Defensive.
In its rush to tell us we’re good enough, that well-meaning voice can interfere with our growth. It can keep us from seeking out instruction from someone whose expertise exceeds our own. It can stop us from reaching out to other artists within our community, lulling us into a sense of self-sufficiency when our art would truly benefit from engagement with other artists.
It can even make us cynical, succumbing to a sort of reverse snobbery that leads us to sneer at any semblance of popular success as selling out.
Clinging to one’s outsider status is every bit as limiting as holding a bias in favor of the institutional stamp of approval.
Artists, Not Islands
To recognize that art comes from within doesn’t mean we’re islands. To understand that all learning is essentially self-teaching doesn’t mean that instructors are of no value.
For those of us working outside academia, where certificates and letters have little to do with our daily work, gaining expertise is a two-part process of showing up and opening up, both to the unique desires of the Artful Heart and to the guidance of the world, in whatever shape that guidance may take.
If you sense that you’re underplaying your part out of some perceived lack of credentials, by all means address that perception. And know that school is just one of many paths. But beware of the cheerleading self-talk that can talk you right out of growth and change. Reaching out for connection, seeking out expertise, these are not signs of lack, but indications of a new and more complex understanding of what it means to be an artist, i.e. one who is artfully engaged with the world.
A novelist Ursula K. LeGuin wrote, “In the dark, under the waters, all islands touched, and were one.”
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