Hi All,

Over the last several months, I have been blogging at my new address:  www.shapingdestinythebook.com  It is hard to blog in multiple places and I’ve concentrated my efforts in art, writing, and life at one location.

I hope you will check it out and follow me there.

All the best,

Destiny

The class, from what I could tell, had focused on art criticism but had covered a lot of ground.  The student propositions were wide and varied, ranging from critique being the most important validation of art to the role China is playing in shaping the art market. 

I was my usual self –  opinionated and passionate.  I do not really belong in the quiet halls of academia where objectivity, analysis, and intellect reign supreme.  No, I belong in the gutters of chaotic materials, memories and dreams.  I live in the mud-pie magic of childhood jubilance, the anguished mayhem of decision making in an atmosphere bereft of rules, and the always yearning for something true.  In my studio, or in front of a blank screen on my computer, there is seldom solid ground. 

I remember a literature class I once took where the professor led our class through an analytical dissection of a work by some well known poet.  I followed her lecture and participated in the discussion on rhythm, use of metaphor and simile, and the context of time and place, but in my head I was screaming, “It’s a poem!  Just feel it!  Let it be!”  Listening to the dissection of that poem was like watching an autopsy of a living thing, a puppy under a knife.  No, I do not belong in classrooms.    

Today was a little different.  I wasn’t there as a student, though I learned some things.  I didn’t really care what people thought of my opinions, and I was enchanted by the young women in the class.  Some were savvy and articulate.  Some were passionate and committed.  One seemed to have recently climbed out of bed.  They had pushed themselves for this assignment and their frustration and excitement were contagious.  My friend, the adjunct for whom I had come, appeared to have been an excellent teacher. 

Yet at the end, on this last day of what must have been an intense and heated semester, there was no consensus, no qualifying absolute about how to talk about art now.  In this post modern world, where truth doesn’t exist, concept is more important than perception, and form has transcended line and plane, the traditional vocabulary for determining artistic merit is seemingly obsolete.  

Everyone in the class had their own opinion.  There was no text book conclusion.  I silently applauded my friend for teaching her students that the questions are always more important then the answers.   Still, I found it ironic that “talking about art now” seems more subjective than it has ever been.  Is this a good thing?  Or are we collectively “dumbing down?”  Are independent authors and artists the barbarians at the gate, or are we righteously revolting against oppressive tyranny?  How do we set the bar, or should there be one?  I welcome your thoughts.

My new book, Shaping Destiny:  A quest for meaning  will launch officially on March 16 at 6 pm at Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe, NM.

Shaping Destiny is about the conflicts between who we were taught to be and who we actually are. It drives to the heart of what it means to be a woman and an artist while it reveals the sources of art that lie hidden in one’s own personal experience.

This powerful and compelling narrative illuminates the creative process, shows us new ways of looking at and talking about art, and demonstrates how making art helps us discover our humanity and determine our lives.

Ted Orland, co-author of the bestselling book, Art & Fear, said “The closest literary fellow traveler to Shaping Destiny that comes to mind is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Shaping Destiny puts a finger on some important truths about the interaction between life and art – including the painful and difficult parts – and lays bare those truths with courage and conviction.”

You can pre-order your signed copy of Shaping Destiny by clicking the add to cart button below.

Let’s take the premise that my potential client is correct.  According to his calculation, the average price for a painting or a steel sculpture should not exceed $200.  That means that in order t0 gross $70,000 a year (gross means before you deduct the business related expenses of art) that I would have to sell about $140,000 to make the $70,000 gross I am talking about.  That is because the cost of selling the art — either independently or through galleries — costs approximately 50% of the price of the work.  So, that means that I would have to make and sell 700 artworks/year.  Given that professional artists can usually complete 1 work of art every 3 to 4 days, I would have to work 376 hours a week to just make enough work (assuming that every piece I make will sell in a year).  Then, I have to work an additional 10 hours a week to box and ship all the works, and about 30 hours a week to market the work so that it has a chance of selling.  Ok, I’m superwoman.  I can work 416 hours a week.  Let’s see what that gets me.

After commissions (or the cost of marketing if you are an independent) lets look at the cost of making the art itself.  1st, I need a studio.  As a Santa Fe sculptor, the cost for  a studio big enough to do the kind of work I do is, on the low end, about $800/month.  The utilities run another $150/month.  My insurance, health insurance and other fixed costs run around $420/month.  That adds up to $16,440.  Now lets look at the cost of my materials.  On average, I spend about $800/month in steel, welding gas, welding wire and patina chemicals.  I spend another $350/month on painting supplies.  At my current production level of about 70 pieces/year, that adds up to $13,800.  Ok, now multiply that by 10 to get to the 700 pieces I have to make and sell each year and it works out to $138,000.  So, to sell $140,000 worth of art to gross $70,000, I have to spend $154,440.  Wow!!  That means, I lose $84,000/year.  I have zero money to feed my family, put gas in my car, or pay my mortgage.  Instead, I’m bankrupt.

Or, I can get a full time job, make a few pieces a year and try to sell them with whatever disposable income I have and be happy that someone is willing to pay a portion of my investment in my art.

Art is expensive because it has to be.  My average piece sells for about $2600.  I sell around 50 pieces each year (some years are better, others are worse).  I make about 70 pieces/year and destroy many of them because they didn’t come out right no matter how hard I tried.  I make a living. Not a great living, but a living and I get to do the work that feeds not only my soul, but the souls of my collectors.

What do you think?  How should art be priced?  What is your time worth?  I would love to hear your thoughts.

“The closest literary fellow traveler to Shaping Destiny that comes to my mind is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  Shaping Destiny puts a finger on some important truths about the interaction between life and art – including the painful and difficult parts – and lays bare those truths with courage and conviction.” – Ted Orland, co-author of the best selling book Art and Fear

The book is a journey through the creative process, sculpture, and life.

Untitled from Destiny Allison Fine Art on Vimeo.

Here is the video from the reading.  Let me know what you think. 

Chapter 1

Night was when my lack of voice was most apparent.  It was then, during silent moments void of chaos, that I realized I did not know myself.   I could not speak or write.  My desire to give form to my ideas of love and marriage caused me to gift my very essence to a man before I even knew what it was.   Imprisoned by my choice, I couldn’t breathe.  My husband and I were fighting.  He was in one room studying for a promotion he didn’t want and I was in another trying to write. But I was unable to express the picture in my mind.  A lump of clay was on my desk, a crude reminder of my chaotic day with my children.  It was soft, Plasticine clay for children and hobbyists.  Taking it in my hands, I made a tiny figurine of a grotesquely pregnant woman.  She was disproportionate.  Her arched back barely compensated for the hard, swollen mass that was her belly.  I folded her legs in a sitting position and wrapped long, worm-like arms underneath her stomach so I would not have to model tiny hands.  The figure had holes for eyes and a mask for a face.  I could not make her hair look natural, so I crowned her with a wreath and she became regal in spite of the fact that she was only five inches tall.  She reminded me of my own pregnancy. She was not glowing or holy but appeared tired, resigned.  Her face looked up, away from her baby, and her gaze was direct, not dreamy.  I knew that she would endure this pregnancy and not get lost in motherhood as I had.  She would keep her identity intact, even as her shape shifted and grew. 

I rolled the sticky, brown clay between my fingers, feverishly smoothing and pressing little pieces onto the form. I forgot about my husband in the other room, forgot about the children sleeping above me, forgot that my desk needed to be clean and that the wood beneath my feet required care. The only thing that mattered was the clay before me because in it, I felt a hunger for something more than I had known.

The creation of that first sculpture was cathartic.  It was the first time I had asked about roles, about being female, about the conflict between what I was expected to be, feel, and do, and what I wanted to be, feel, and do.  It opened the door to who I am instead of who I would become, but I didn’t recognize the opening.  I only knew that I was dissatisfied, that I needed more time and more clay.

For a year, between diaper changes and trips to the park, building Lego towers and singing children to sleep, money struggles, and sex that never went deep or far enough, I made tiny women — women that were in the throws of orgasm and giving birth. They were the symbols of all the things I was supposed to be because they were graceful and small, pregnant or submissive.  They were terrible sculptures but they taught me how to give to myself….

This is only the first bit of the chapter.  I want to know if you want to keep reading and would appreciate your thoughts.  Thanks.

I had been dreaming of paintings, of giclees.  The first proof– back from the printer today was so close to the original you wouldn’t know it wasn’t original until you touched it–was a scary thing so that I kept my distance, circling it cautiously with the feeling that somehow, if I am not very, very careful it will bite me.   And it could.  I’ve never been a fan of giclee for all the usual reasons.  Still, the weight and time factor make them appealing for these steel paintings and the cost makes them more than affordable for people wanting the work and unable, especially now, to hit the prices of originals.

The dogs came running up the hill to my calls, tails wagging and thirsty as though howling in the middle of the night was something usual, fun and even necessary. 

15 minutes later, after I lay back down under the full moon in the bed on our bedroom patio, they began again.  Another door, somewhere in the house was open and cursing,  I knew I was awake for the duration. 

This time, yelling  for the dogs again – urgently now and with a pitch somewhat hysterical, kin to them crazy under the moon–my thoughts were of  Jason Shinder.  This is especially weird. 

Jason was a poet.  He founded the national Writers Voice program at the 57th street YMCA in New York city.  He fervently  believed in art, in arts education, and in demystifying the ever pervasive myths about artists.  He gave his life to that.  In all his years as an arts advocate, he only published two small volumes of his own poetry.  His third book was published after his death.

In 2001, just before 9/11, I  had been working in the national YMCA arts and humanities program under Jason (a long way under Jason) and it was the first time in my life that being an artist was not only ok, it was imperative to others beside myself. 

Jason was a kind of hero to me.  I took his teachings to heart and worked overly hard at teaching my staff, the grant makers, the parents and the kids that all artists are not smelly, sexually deviant, lazy, deranged, unreliable, or any of the other myths typically associated with artists.  They are, instead, just people who do things both amazing and mundane but who are intrinsic to what it means to be human.  They are our collective voice. 

Jason also, indirectly, is responsible for me becoming a full time artist.  I had been working at implementing the Writers Voice program in Santa Fe.  In collaboration with the annual book festival, I had organized a reading by several well known writers at the Lensic and Jason, personally, was going to do a reading for us.  He had even brought in Pam Houston for the event.  All my bosses from the Albuquerque Y were in attendance.  Pam Houston cancelled.  There were kids and parents and people I had begged to come just to fill the huge room.  Jason got on stage and proceeded to read explicity sexual poetry to an audience both conservative and unknown.  My bosses were shocked.  I was shocked.  All that training  and he’s reciting poetry about as explicit as it can be without being downright pornography.  So much for demystifying the stereotypes about artists!  A few weeks later, after 9/11 and a new executive director who believed the Y needed to be about God and basketball, I lost my job.  It was a laid off, get your shit out of here, kind of thing that blew a hole in my world about as big as I had seen. 

It was also the thing that made me say to myself, ”Now or never.”  I became a full time artist and didn’t look back.  I haven’t thought about Jason for years.  I learned that he had died in 2008, but other than that he hadn’t really crossed my mind.  It kind of surprised me that he was on the edge of my consciousness under the moon this morning. 

Then I realized that I had written a blog post on the new website for my gallery this afternoon describing a fledgling artist collective and how its not really hip or cool, that most of the artists look like normal people most of the time, but how there is something magic in the air.  An energy and vitality that quickens the pulse, a dialog both witty and strange, a community for whom art is not only imperative, its as natural as breathing. 

Jason danced with a soft shoe.  He negotiated.  He compromised.  He was the bridge between worlds until he had an opportunity to be on stage as merely an artist.  Then, though I had heard him read multiple times prior in different political settings, he let loose, shocking us all, becoming on that stage not the director, not the educator, not even the man.  He was, in that instant, a poet — vulnerable, real, hard core and bristling — and he changed my life forever (though not, I’m sure, as he would have liked to).

I’m fortunate today to live in the kind of community Jason sought to create nationwide.  I don’t think I would be working so hard at sparking this collective if it hadn’t been for him and what he taught me.  He stayed a bridge in my life and I’m glad, writing this, that he was still there somewhere in my deep subconsious waiting for a moon, coyotes, baying dogs and the middle of the night to surface and remind me that though we are unpredicatable, often weird, crazily vulnerable and scary honest, we are the voices, the hopes, and the middle of the night dreams.   The catalysts and crusaders.  The harbingers of change.

I love the rain. Dust down, quiet afternoons in a light gray hue. Deep shadows, light winds, the smell of earth and life and growing things tempering the urethane reek and soot covered atmosphere in my studio. After so many days of hot and dry, the rain is a soothing thing and the work is going faster. I have been painting on steel.

Last week, after dinner with my friend Nancy Reyner, we walked through a gallery looking at work. Nancy doesn’t look at composition. She doesn’t look at content. She looks first at
the surface. If a painting doesn’t grab her there, she doesn’t go further. Good painting, for her, is something she wants to lick.  I love that.

A still, clear pond, a gnarled piece of wood, slashes of rain against a horizon and the wet slick of its stain on a slab of rock – outside of texture and in spite of gloss, depth  is revealed through age and weather, atmosphere and water. The surfaces of things worth licking are a blending, a dialog, a union.

Recently, somewhere between scotch at a party and sake with friends over dinner, I glanced through an article about art in the newest edition of Trend Magazine.  Part of the article talked about Bruce Nauman and how he had decided that since he is an artist, everything he does is art.  It didn’t hit me until this morning when, moving metal around on the floor again, I realized that I didn’t care about the piece I was been working on.  It’s just another piece.  I have been filling an order, acting like a factory worker, doing my job.

As my indifference filled me with the desire to be anywhere but here, I wondered if the sculpture is still art even if I don’t care about it.   Is it art when I leave my studio and hit my computer to wrestle with this question in words?  Is it art if I do nothing at all?  The profundity of his statement garnered a new respect in me for Nauman.  The questions it demands require something deeper than the mere meaning of any individual work.  It drives at the heart of what we do and why we do it.

We all wrestle with the definition of art.  I have spent more than a few late night hours ranting into cyber space about what I think, or had thought, art is.  I am quick to reduce something to drivel if
its purpose is, at first glance, less than noble or lofty.  I am seldom interested in works that confuse or have no point. I look for things that move me and little does.

Consequently, my gut instinct is to shut the door on these questions.  It’s ridiculous, really, to postulate that since I am an artist, everything I do must be art.  That’s like stating that since I am a doctor, everything I do must be healing.  And yet there is some whispering of truth, a possibility, even a hope that art is more than object, more than something that just happens, more than the raw emotive or intellectual expression of individual experience.

It’s ironic.  Just as I am celebrating the fact that craftsmanship is “in” again and artists who actually make their work are in vogue, I am suddenly consumed with something that has nothing to do with what I make and that may, over time, reveal the fact that what I make is less relevant than my intention.

Obviously, our work informs us.  As we progress in thought and emotion, honing the skills of our expression through the day in and day out of the studio, what we make evolves and so does the sophistication of our minds and hearts.  The two – what I make and what I think – are necessarily related.  They are symbiotic.  Still, after almost 20 years in the studio, I am absolutely baffled by the possibility that art is not defined by the form or the design, or even the honesty with which I examine myself and my world and that it is, instead, inherent in the doing of it.  What Nauman suggests to me is that it doesn’t really matter what I make or what media I choose at any given moment.  What matters are my intention and my process.  The object is only the expression of the art.  It isn’t the art itself.

The question, “If I don’t care about it, is it still art?” seems to be answered not by the object I am creating but by determining whether or not I am engaged or fully present in the creation of it — questioning, looking, probing at the weak spots, breathing it in – until something forms, pushes back, and demands a voice.  This morning, the art wasn’t the sculpture.  It was the act of sculpting coupled with a fragment of thought and the desire to be anywhere else but where I was.  The art then is the action.  The expression, this time, is the blog.

In addition, beginning around the middle of June, I will be a feature blogger for the new SantaFe.Com.  The blog will be titled, “Creative Pulse,” and will focus on creative process.  In addition to exploring the canyons of my own process, I will be interviewing and talking with other artists about their experiences.  Here is a sample of the kind of blog I will be posting:

A Conversation with Donald Rubenstein

I met last night with Donald Rubenstein, a musician and artist so consumed with his creative endeavors that he prefers not to talk.  There is, he said, no time for it.  I sense from him that talking sets free those elusive fragments of imagination that might, if given enough time and pressure, evolve into something new.  For him it is risky to let them loose or drop them casually.  They are like pieces of stars that drown in the atmosphere.

 Our conversation was consequently reticent, a halting thing that wouldn’t flow in spite of the wine we shared.  I asked him about his pursuit of the new.  I wanted his help in understanding avant-garde works — installations where fur grows from cracks in the walls or videos where water drips repeatedly on a circular reel – that are esteemed and celebrated as museum quality art.  He asked me to take notes. He almost left before we started.  He was exceedingly kind. 

I fired off my questions:  Is art defined by the artist alone?  Is there a point to making art?  Do artists have a responsibility to society?  And he replied, “I believe in the artists creating the new.  I don’t believe in the form.  I do like pushing the boundaries but I don’t think the new comes from an obvious place. A great artist defines their approach internally.  It has nothing to do with the format or time.  It has to do with them, with how they turn things inside out from their perspective.  It doesn’t matter if you are traditional or avant-garde.  It only matters that you are imbuing a new truth through whatever form you use to express.” I wanted more.  I wanted him to go beyond the surface of the thing, beyond the polished words and well formed thoughts into something deeper, more personal and more profound. 

The wine was good, the afternoon light was softening toward evening and the restaurant was starting to fill.  We told stories and shook our heads at things both silly and bizarre.  We spoke some of business, of making a living as an artist, of upcoming travels.  But it wasn’t enough.   

 Donald is a bit of a mystery.  His art ranges from sophisticated music compositions to prints reminiscent of the characters in South Park.  He is articulate, accomplished, and driven and he has never stuck to just one thing at a time.  Almost everything he produces is an amalgam of forms and disciplines and they all have a spark.  His works have a tension; a sense of questions asked and seldom answered that hint of the possibilities just outside the boundaries of what we understand.  He is raw and immediate and while not all of his work speaks to me, it is always startling, always honest.

 But Donald doesn’t like to talk.  In what I felt was the middle of our conversation, he said he’d had enough.  He was done talking.  Creative process is, for him, private and he had already said more than made him comfortable.  He was leaving. Amazingly this made me cry.  Somehow through this stilted exchange of uneasy dialog, where we skirted around the edges of most things and quipped our well thought convictions, I opened.  

It was embarrassing to cry in front of a man I respect and barely know but I couldn’t help it.  The tears welled and fell and couldn’t be hidden.  I had been so engaged, so challenged and focused that his impending departure was like a slap in the face.

After he had gone, I realized that the experience, for me, was like making art.  In my studio, I start out usually with a question.  I design a form, structure its composition and think I know where I’m going.  I’ve touched on something powerful but haven’t harnessed it.  I go deeper, moving the elements, adding texture here, a line there then all of a sudden, the piece takes its own direction and gives me a slap. Instantly, occasionally tearfully, I am in the throes of myself—hurtling breakneck through a darkened tunnel where shafts of dim light on the walls reveal the tattered scrawling of my memories and the blood inked hieroglyphs of my desires.  It is from this place my art comes and, as in the conversation with Donald, where I learn something I only thought I knew.