"Am I an Artist?"
The existential-vocational crisis experienced by many an artist ... including yours truly
When I told my father I wanted to go to art school his reply was an efficient: “No.” Though he was of the hippie generation that movement somehow skipped over him. He’d not been drafted to Vietnam (his brother was) and he busied himself working in his parents’ small grocery store and kept his hair cut high and tight until he found Jesus and met my mother shortly thereafter.
My dad funneled his musical aspirations through the church (oops). He tried at every church we ever attended to become the worship leader. He loved music. In the 1970s after he found Jesus he burned all his vinyl.1 I won’t tell you what was in that collection. It would make you cry, too.
After his divorce he mostly gave up on the idea of becoming a worship leader and started up a small cover-song quartet that performed at local coffee shops and church-based singles’ events.
He was incredibly talented. And he was incredibly scared. He never pursued his musical gifts in the industry outside the local church.
My paternal grandfather’s mantra, “Money isn’t everything, but it’s right up there with breathing,” was so ingrained in my dad it caused him to give me some terrible advice growing up. Namely: do not actually pursue your creativity; get a ‘real’ job. Oof. That’s one hell of a life sentence. Thank God my local church kicked me out and Jesus made me deal with that problematic ideology in seminary. Until that happened I was on a very similar trajectory as my dad.
My seminary friends saw something different in me. They championed the artist inside of me. Before that, so early on, my husband gave me the best gift I’ve ever been given: belief in my creative abilities. He told me to leave my day job and go be a photographer.
The first time2 he said that I could not compute. One does not simply go be anything they want to be. It turns out hubby was right: I went back to work at my college job at a camera store and started up my photography business3
He was right for a specific reason, though: I am an artist. It’s my vocation in life. It’s what I’m meant to do. And the more I look back at the family I’ve come from (a mix of entrepreneurs and creatives), and understand how my brain works (pattern recognition champion over here), I realize me living into my vocation as an artist is me honoring who God made me to be and become. It’s not audacious.4 It’s true.
Often families, like mine, tell their young adults to seek out security even before they can exercise their creative muscles. Artists and creatives in the church are regularly told to be humble rather than supported in how to develop spiritually as artists.
(You too? Tell me about it)
Churches today are regularly run more like businesses than places of deep soul nurturing or discipleship.5 I can only imagine what it’s like trying to keep a church, and a building, and a paid pastoral staff afloat today. Impossible. So shade, but not too much.
In spite of all the opposition to me becoming who I was created to become, with the help of many, many, many discerning, generous, and deeply kind people here I am, in all my artistic glory.6
Today, I am so amazed that I get to return the favor to other artists who are sometimes too afraid to even ask, “Am I an artist?”
“Dear, baby artist,”7 I pause for emphasis, “if you’re asking the question, likely the answer is yes.”
I highly doubt it was Jesus inviting him to burn his record collection.
Yeah, I’m a slower learner at times. Or, stubborn. Porque no los dos?
Jeeperty creepers that was in 2006. I’ve been at this a minute!
I’m working on building this muscle though.
Wrote a whole ass thesis on it in seminary. Maybe one day I’ll share some of it here. Lemme know if that intrigues you.
Let me be quite clear: artistic vocation/identity are not synonymous with career or unending accolades.
Not literally. I’m much more subtle in spiritual direction sessions.