© The Artist.
my not so brillant career
My Feelings of Failure
Even more liberating was to re-read a quote from Immendorf, the wild german painter. I sketched this after his canvas ‘ Society of Deficiency’ which is in the Saatchi Collection, London.
Immendorf, like Beuys I think, was a liberating teacher:
I tell my students take your time. Breathe for twenty or so years. Try & make a portrait of yourself that depicts whereyou will be in twenty or so years from now.
Well, that portrait of me in twenty years time seemed along way away, so I started a self-portrait with some old watercolour on the back of an old failed watercolour. I would like to be able to paint portraits well. I would like to have portraits of my loved ones & my children… if it’s going to take me twenty years to get good, then I better get started straight away before they grow up.
postscript 2013 :
Regretably I still get these depressing feelings of deficiency , that I haven’t achieved much nor made half as many, half as good… Also now, that time si short & doesn’t go on & on. Tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow…
….. so little? ….still always failure? less ambitious now too, which is OK too.
My lovely kids are growing up so quickly, as kids always do. I still would like to make some good portraits of my loved ones & my children. Here’s a recent one.
The moral? If there is one, it must be ‘enjoy the journey’ 🙂
The things I thought were so important — because of the effort I put into them — have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered. – Thomas Merton