When the Legends Fail

I was recently chatting with an old friend from art school. We’ve kept in touch over the years seeing each other’s art shift and form, succeed and fail. We’ve encouraged each other to stay in the race and not give up. I showed him a picture of something I was working on recently. It was just a light hearted cute little illustration of some auburn fall leaves tumbling down turning into little crimson hearts. 

“These are deeply satisfying,” he says. “Like Winslow Homer met Bill Watterson. Except more free.” 

I don’t believe that my little illustration merited such a tremendous compliment. But I took it anyway. Both of these artists are legends to me. It took me back to my childhood. I didn’t grow up close to the sea. Though I may have loved it as much as Winslow Homer did. I grew up in the landscape of Bill Watterson. The American Midwest. Fall, winter, spring, and summer. Calvin’s summers were much like mine, growing up in a place where the city was far away and the woods were in abundance. I read those comics during the long summer months when school was out and there was nothing to do. The mornings were late, the days were long, and the nights were filled with fireflies flickering over open fields. 

Idyllic. 

An artist, a cartoonist, a philosopher, a storyteller, a legend… and a six-year-old kid forever. Watterson has gone to a place where few have gone: a place of unprecedented success where his personal integrity and the purity of his art were maintained. With an uncompromising attitude, he turned away more fame and fortune than many of us will ever know to uphold the intrinsic value of his art and not cheapen it with endless merchandizing. 

I went to purchase the latest book about him, Exploring Calvin and Hobbes. It contains the crown jewel of interviews: a 35-page interview with Bill Watterson. Liquid gold in the form of words. The reclusive cartoonist opens up about his life and work after so many years of silence. And I do respect his silence.

He’s open, poignant, wise, and naturally very very funny. He also talks about one thing that we can all relate to: Failure (with a capital F). He was fired from his first job out of college and this is what he said about it:

True, although there were a number of years out in the wilderness. My failure was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me, although I don’t recommend the humiliation and insolvency so much. But if my experience at the Post hadn’t been so catastrophic, I don’t think I would have started over. I’d have limped along doing weak editorial cartoons, and would have never gotten to what I was good at. I didn’t want to throw away all that time and effort, but sometimes you can’t move forward without going back to the beginning to get your bearings again.

And in the long run, nothing is wasted. It takes a while to see this, but it’s true. I learned a lot about drawing and about how to work with complex ideas for those years. It was valuable. The failure also raised the stakes for me on a personal level. Years later, when I finally got syndicated—when they finally opened the gate—I ran like my head was on fire. The Post failure made me realize that this wasn’t going to come as easily as I’d thought. So I treated the marathon as if it were a flat-out sprint.

I love what he has to say about his failure. I love it so much. 

Nothing is wasted. 

I’ve experienced a decent share of failure in life. I'm still waiting for the return on many of those "investments." Oceans of missed opportunity, poor choices, and other inadequacies. There were palliatives for mistakes. And yet, nothing is wasted. That seems like too much grace for me. But I think it’s true. I believe in grace. There is a need for grace in our world. 

Don’t be afraid of failure. Don’t be afraid of that wilderness, even if it may last for a few years longer than expected. There is grace and the courage to change. Failure may cause charting a new course and new unexpected opportunities may lie in wait. Maybe the legend of success is different than what success is in real life. Staying true to oneself may be the cause for a longer and more winding road. 

Let’s stay in the marathon and overcome. It may take longer than expected, but it will be worth it. Let’s turn mishaps into adventures, problems into opportunities, and failure in to success. 

Patience is Everything

Sometimes we artists are in a fury of creating and making good art with words, paints, clay … and sometimes we tumble out of that storm and can't seem to make a thing. Life happens and responsibilities take precedence. Studio spaces with that coveted north light shining in turn into cramped closets with no sunlight at all. Large oil paintings on canvases turn into small sketches on old coffee stained napkins. Beautiful oaken shelves that once displayed our most precious and meaningful collections turn into cardboard boxes taped shut as the footholds of having a home become ever elusive. Time and seasons slowly pass by. And we wait. We wait constantly for the same wick to absorb the salubrious precipitations of creativity and ignite into flame. 

I had a conversation with a friend of mine, an emerging writer, about these highs and lows. She looked at me and said, "You, my friend, are an artist even if you're painting or not. " I stared back at her wanting to believe that it was that simple and true. She then referred a book to me, Letters to a Young Poet, authored by Mark Harman. It's a collection of 10 letters that were written between 1902 - 1908 when the nineteen year old aspiring poet, Franz Kappus, wrote to the then twenty-six year old poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, seeking advice about his poetry. I found that these were not only letters, but a great life manual that reaches to the soul. 

I wanted to share with you a quote from one of my favorite parts in this little book.

He writes,

It’s all about carrying to term and giving birth. To let every impression and every seed of a feeling realize itself on its own, in the dark, in the unconveyable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of your understanding, and to await with deep humility and patience the hour when a new clarity is born; this alone is to live artistically, in understanding as in creation.

Time is no measure there, a year is worthless, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means not to calculate and not to count; to mature like a tree that does not pressure its sap and stands amid the spring storms with assurance and without the slightest dear that summer might not come. It does come. But it comes only for the patient ones, who stand about as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and vast. I learn this every day, learn it amidst considerable pain, for which I am grateful. Patience is everything!

What I like about this quote is that he describes what it's like when something faint is ruminating inside waiting to take form. Sometimes it is time to fight for it. To fight with pens and papers or with paints and brushes to bring it out. Other times it’s a time to wait and trust that it will come to its full fruition, like the slow passing of winter into spring. Many times it doesn’t come in the timeframe we want it to come and it doesn't always take on the form that we think it should, but to some degree it’s true and sincere. Discerning when to fight and when to wait is always complicated and unclear - to me at least. Maybe it will be easier as the journey continues. 

In this letter, I am reminded of mostly of patience. Patience for the moments when you're making everything you have ever wanted to make and patience for the moments when you're not making everything you wish you could. 

Seeds of Imagination

I recently read through a biography on J.R.R. Tolkien, authored by Humphrey Carpenter. Tolkien's valorous and imaginative tales have always been a source of inspiration for me ever since I was young. I got lost in his stories. Countless times I have wished that I were a hobbit from The Shire. In my mind's eye, I still meander to those other worlds from a different time formed by the boundless landscapes of a childlike imagination.

I am on the path that the art paves for me and am set to learn how to wade through its capricious ebbs and flow, even if it progresses ever so slowly and is full of tribulations and self-doubts. Here is how Tolkien describes the process of creating:

"One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter."

The creative process is about being aware to your tendencies. What do you pay attention to? What's already inside of you? What always captures your attention?

My personal compost heap perhaps is made up of empty paint tubes and the overgrown, but ever present, memories of perfect sunsets over a true horizon line. Perhaps the real matter of what's in my mould will be revealed with a little more time and water. Even though I can't see them all, I know there are some really good seeds of imagination there to cultivate and watch grow.