You want some ill-advised guidance? Here you go.
Cut up your art. As in, spend time making something out of paper from scratch with your hands and then take a fresh blade to it. You’re going to want the sharpness of a new blade unless you like your edges rough and if you do, no judgement here.
Cut up someone else’s art. My favorite artwork by Willem de Kooning is the one Robert Rauschenberg erased. Look, there are painters who learn by copying other painters and writers who learn by writing out their favorite books but you know what else there is? Writers who started out in fanfic rabbit holes, fixing endings and plugging plot holes and creating alternative character arcs. You want some of my art to fix, to repurpose, to give a happier or messier ending to? By all means, HAVE AT IT.
Get over perfectionism. If you’re obsessing about the spacing being just right and the colors being in perfect harmony, darling, you’re being a designer. That’s fine but is that what you’re after? True art making rides the line of imperfection well enough to make more than a few people uneasy and spark giddy delight in the heart of an enthusiast searching for evidence that you, the artist, really did will a piece of art into existence. Will this reasoning fly with my future editor? Likely not but I’m going to fight for a handful of my human-created typos on principle.
Said another way, revel in the reality of mediocrity. I don’t fit the profile of an artist destined to be massively consequential in my lifetime. The same is true of practically every artist I know. The world of art works like the cat distribution system: it is mysterious and you are not in control. So let go and make the art you want to see.
Said yet another way, don’t be such a good little artist all the time. There are infinite knots to tie yourself up with regarding the “rules” of art. You do what you can to be compliant over and over and one day you find yourself seething at the tyranny of inconsistent file-naming conventions and say fuck it all right now. Good news! You can skip ahead to that point and save yourself the frustration. Don’t go so far as to be an entitled asshole but don’t be too hasty to make everyone’s life easier, either.
FOMO is a diversion, a distraction, a waste of your time. For longer than I’ve been an artist I’ve maintained that devotion looks like boundaries. You cannot possibly take part in all the things so show up with your whole heart to selective yeses and don’t pay envy or longing taxes because hello, These Times are tax enough on creative hearts.
Don’t turn yourself into a social media algorithm. There’s this thing on Instagram where people post and say “comment with thirst” to get a sip of someone else’s water. Ok, it’s not like that but it’s not not like that. It’s giving transaction, babe. It’s giving basic math. There’s a bumper sticker I bought in 2024 that says “confound the algorithm.” It gets shuffled around in various piles on my desk and I rediscover it during random tidying sprees which is my favorite way to encounter it.
Speaking of confounding algorithms, when you can predict the future, make some new friends. I mean, don’t drop the friends you already have or neglect the communities that have nurtured you, protected you, accepted you. No, don’t do that. But don’t think those are the only people worth surrounding yourself with or the only voices that can take up residence in your head unless you’re content having the same conversations over and over again. When your creative community is too familiar or you notice that gee, it’s such a small world, it’s time to get curious about what lies beyond what you currently know.
Pick yourself. You know what is helpful to an artist (besides not having to cobble together 5 different jobs to live a life)? Seeing enough of your artwork on display so that you can see plot arcs and development and notice side characters that are more of a distraction than a story line you feel invested in. Trying to understand visual art by seeing one piece at a time in a random group show is like trying to understand a novel from a reading where everyone can say just one sentence. You can plod along trying to get the attention of a gallerist who might give you a spot in a two- or three-person show or land the holy grail of a solo show, or you can stage your own. You can treat a hallway or a spare bedroom or empty out a closet for a month just so you can roll fresh paint on the walls and mount a temporary installation. The gallery I most often dream of opening? It’s the laundry room gallery. In effect, we’re already handling triple net on the space anyway. Don’t tell anyone, but I recently staged several installations in my studio and took nice enough photos of them to use them as work samples. Does it matter if the wall was in a space I frequently inhabit in my pajamas? Nah.
Let people into your weird. Maybe not all of the people and maybe not all of your weird so you can keep a little sanctuary pocket that is yours and yours alone. You have to share some of it though because relationships are sustained when there’s enough overlap in shared wierdness. I guess people do in fact bond on the more normie facets of life but I suspect that those bonds are more of situationships, like work friendships that fall apart when a workplace is the only common ground or simple alliances that exist to smooth out the circumstance of repeated interactions.
Other things to share:
I’ll be reading my Art Is Love manifesto at Literary Nights at the Historic Train Depot in Issaquah, WA on July 27. The manifesto was published in the book Manifesto Destiny: Alternatives to Growth at all Costs, edited by Adelaide Blaire for the PNW Conceptual Art Center. Several of the other contributors to the book will be reading as well. There is an open mic portion of the evening and signups are available at literarynights.com.
Also, I have 9 available copies of the manifesto if you’d like to purchase one. It includes manifestos from ahuva s. zaslavsky, Valeria Haven Espinal, Audrey V Haller, Jennifer Fernandez, Stashia Cabral, Rose Lewis, Karl Anderson, Cam Smith, Jenny Wilde, Gabriela Denise Frank, Beril Or, Francis Dot, Eric Chan, Kelly June Mitchell, Pidge Pasqualle, Christopher Luna, Meghan Thréinfhir, Cuco C.G.M, Deborah Poe, and Adelaide Blair.
I am delighted to have the above collage featured in TORN, an exhibition organized by Juniper Rag, who published some of my moon-themed collages in 2021. Everything about the accepted collage is a confluence of coincidence. Recently I revisited the moon series by destroying it. There were 59 collages in the collection and when I started chopping and cutting them up, I tossed some torn paper left over from Let ‘Er Rip into the mix. There were a handful of temporary collages that came out of the experience and A 7-2 Offsuit Is no 6-7 is one of them. The Juniper Rag folks said some very nice things about my work in this Instagram post.
(Let ‘Er Rip is a project organized by Torea Frey that connected the ripped paper work of artist Neva Delashmutt Sincick with collage artists and culminated in a 2025 window installation in Portland, OR.)
By the way, I'll be at Making Meaning this week at Vassar in Poughkeepsie, NY. If you're going or in the vicinity, let's chat.
Until next time,
Andrea
