When I was in college there was this ongoing competitive mindset from the teachers /students that: “If you’re not drawing all night / getting 1 – 2 hours of sleep, you’re going to fall behind.” If you’re an artist you’ve probably met this kind of thinking… I’ve heard it from so many pros / tutorials.
One of my professors said that line all the time. I loved this dude. he worked at Disney on many of my favorite movies, and my young self became absorbed in this mindset. About 3 years into my degree that professor had a stroke, and when he went to the doctor they said he had actually previously had something like 10+ strokes without even knowing, brought on by stress, and that he needed to slow down.
Since then I’ve heard tons of other stories accounts of sickness and divorce brought on from addiction to work.
A few years later I was listening to an Animation podcast interviewing Glen Keane. He brought up that there were other animators who would live and breath their work, never going home, barely sleeping, etc.
What shocked me was that Glen Keane said something like “I ignored this idea, and decided to go home every night to spend time with my family, because I could learn just as much from my life experiences with them.”
Anyway I just wanted to take a second after hearing a statement like this again recently and let any young artists out there know that:
There’s nothing wrong with investing plenty of time studying and drawing, but also be healthy.
I too had other prominent professionals tell me to neglect sleep, sickness, and family in pursuit of my career. I now have chronic back, shoulder, and hand problems.
For your health AND your career, remember to eat, sleep, exercise, and make merry. There’s no way you’re going to produce your best work without living a full life. Art requires input after all.
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This unicorn is judging you.
This unicorn is very sorry that the other unicorn is judging you.
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I swear to every heaven ever imagined,
if I hear one more dead-eyed hipster
tell me that art is dead, I will personally summon Shakespeare
from the grave so he can tell them every reason
why he wishes he were born in a time where
he could have a damn Gmail account.
The day after I taught my mother
how to send pictures over Iphone she texted
me a blurry image of our cocker spaniel ten times in a row.
Don’t you dare try to tell me that that is not beautiful.
But whatever, go ahead and choose to stay in
your backwards-hoping-all-inclusive club
while the rest of us fall in love over Skype.
Send angry letters to state representatives,
as we record the years first sunrise so
we can remember what beginning feels like when
we are inches away from the trigger.
Lock yourself away in your Antoinette castle
while we eat cake and tweet to the whole universe that we did.
Hashtag you’re a pretentious ass hole.
Van Gogh would have taken 20 selflies a day.
Sylvia Plath would have texted her lovers
nothing but heart eyed emojis when she ran out of words.
Andy Warhol would have had the worlds weirdest Vine account,
and we all would have checked it every morning while we
Snap Chat our coffee orders to the people
we wish were pressed against our lips instead of lattes.
This life is spilling over with 85 year olds
rewatching JFK’s assassination and
7 year olds teaching themselves guitar over Youtube videos.
Never again do I have to be afraid of forgetting
what my fathers voice sounds like.
No longer must we sneak into our families phonebook
to look up an eating disorder hotline for our best friend.
No more must I wonder what people in Australia sound like
or how grasshoppers procreate.
I will gleefully continue to take pictures of tulips
in public parks on my cellphone
and you will continue to scoff and that is okay.
But I hope, I pray, that one day you will realize how blessed
you are to be alive in a moment where you can google search
how to say I love you in 164 different languages.
Sometimes an artist just finds a niche and runs with it.
Take Eduard von Grützner, for example. German painter back in the early 1900s. He tried a whole bunch of stuff over the course of his career, but eventually he settled into doing paintings of fat, sassy monks drinking booze.
