On Creativity and Wealth
I wrote a bouncing check today. It was at the Bank of Chaos. You know the one, that place we all go to pull creative kernels from the aether - the cauldron where ideas are stirred in a pot-luck soup of half-forgotten memories and unfinished dreams - where sound investments pay inspiration, novelty, and wonder.
As these things go, I suppose mine would be considered a high volume account. At least my family eats partially dependent upon my creative trade.
So, I've been getting a little careless, taking on jobs like I lived on a planet with a fifty hour daily rotation instead of this damned skinny twenty-four hour stint which saddles all of us. A friend and fellow photographer recently went all digital, consigning his old photo chemicals to the illegal drug manufacturers - where they'll get used. His trade has always been "spaghetti-portraiture" - school yearbook type stuff, youth sports, etc... Now digital, he started doing weddings - actually taking on way too much work than he currently has resources to deliver in a timely fashion. Wedding shots are very special but usually unappreciated if they're delivered after the couple has long since divorced.
He called me, desperate to catch up on some color-correcting, leveling, and cropping that needed to be done on a wedding he shot last May. I'm snowed under with other contract work at the moment, but he convinced me that his reputation was at stake. The mother of the bride was "mole"-esting him with angry calls, saying he was slow as "mole"-asses. So I told him to go ahead and drop off the DVDRom disc full of raw images and this seemed to "mole"-ify his fears.
I apologize for my "mole"-evolent attitude, but I guess I have "moles" on the brain because the bride in those shots had a doozy smack in the middle of her forehead. I had to be careful not to cover it while having to use Photoshop's heal brush to dampen the river of shine laying an inch thick atop her caked orange powdered make-up. She was, simply put, not very pretty.
I realize I'm being unkind and hardly fair. I inherited a genetic predisposition to age rather gracefully, though with another nod to Mike Meyers' Austin Powers character, a lifetime addiction to the caffeine in cola has left me with the teeth of a proper Englishman.
But you can't clinch your lips over a mole in the middle of a forehead, though I think I saw some old man, eyes blood-shot from the reception give it a try. There were nearly four hundred individual shots. Time began to crawl and my creative cup went dry.
They say all brides are beautiful - I soon found myself staring blankly, zombie-like, at my screen, and not for the first time, wondering who the hell "they" were.
My mind drifted and I thought about the concept of "creativity" - How poor some of us are, how fabulously brilliant and wealthy are some others. I remembered how easily drawing had come to me as a child, how quickly I had learned to paint realistic detail, even in my early twenties. I smiled, remembering how creatively wealthy I had then considered myself, and how dillusionally WRONG I had been.
I painted hundreds of pictures throughout my twenties - actually made a living of sorts, but they had no real worth. I took no chances. I merely copied preexisting scenes. My work had no context, no flavor, no investment of time spent within the true cauldron of creative chaos.
Beware of technical proficiency. It can lull you into a false sense of creative wealth, and make you write bad checks.
Context is a curious, ever present issue with what we artists do. With my apologies to those more brilliant younger prodigies, for me there has been no substitute for age and experience in learning the mature application of appropriate context within my work. And I hardly think I'm alone.
Remembering this, my pulse quickened a bit - and the overdraft protection on my creative bank account kicked in. I noticed something wonderful then in each and every wedding picture I opened. It was the absolutely blind, adoring love seen in the gazes of this young girl's parents and in the worshiping, sparkling eyes of the groom. I began to see her with their vision - in the proper context - and suddenly I found her beautiful beyond measure. And my creative cup refilled.
Sometimes idly, I wonder who among us was the richest - who in mankind's long aesthetic history had the wealthiest creative mind. My money's on Leonardo Da Vinci. You understand that would be "cash" money, of course.