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Impressionism: Am I a failed artist, or has art been my healer?

Behind the artist identity
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Impressionism with Rob O'Flanagan

I’ve considered myself an artist for a long time, since back when I was a recent university graduate on the verge of homelessness, couch-surfing and possessed by magical thinking.

I’m still a magical thinker, though more pragmatic than before. And I remain, at times, quite haunted by the fear of destitution.

When you’re poor, depressed and emotionally battered and bruised, it is vital to give your suffering a higher purpose, otherwise the spirit is drained of hope. And a hopeless life is too frightening to endure. That higher purpose for me was as ‘starving artist.’  

Back then, back in the early 1980s, I don’t know what exactly happened. It had to do with my beliefs, my insecurity, my arrogance, and, although I didn’t realize it at the time, it likely had a lot to do with stored up trauma from a childhood of abuse and neglect.

I kind of languished for a few years after university, gave up a few things that I loved, like baseball, and got blocked up, darkened and generally scared of my own shadow.

University gave me purpose and confidence. It made me feel important to study the history of the world, the great books, the most erudite thinkers, and all the great artists.

One of my favourite things to do in school was look at pictures. Reading came hard to me because of a learning/attention problem – maybe related to that stored up trauma the psychotherapists talk about today.

I looked at the cubists, the surrealists, the impressionists – at Picasso, de Kooning, O’Keefe, Johns, Rauschenberg. I looked at the pictures and thought, I could do that. Looking at pictures is easy. I thought painting was easy, too. It’s not.

I started thinking of myself as a visual artist. I put a lot into it, crafted an identity around it. And I started working hard at it, producing and producing and producing, all the while living in fairly squalid and impoverished circumstances, and growing more despondent in the process due mostly to the fright of poverty.

I had shows, I got better, but painting never really felt like my calling, like the thing I was meant to do. In a deep down way I felt I had nothing really to lose from it.

Mostly what I wanted was the sense of higher purpose that came from the identity, and the comfort that I got from engaging in an activity that felt like it had that higher purpose.  

That identity as an artist took hold like a tattoo that I couldn’t scrub off. From then to now, I have made art. Now and then, I pull off something that to me is quite special, quite deep. But I’d say nine out of 10 times, I have failed at it.

Lately, I have been cleaning out my studio space. This is the second time in about three or four years that I’ve got down on my knees and cleared my art space out. This time, it feels like a death of sorts. Or maybe a very painful birth.

There is always a lot of old stuff around. Most of my work over the last 15 years has gone unsold. I’ve had shows and sold nothing. It was as though the powers of the cosmos were trying to tell me to give it up. I was not wanted at the Art World trough.

But success or none, I feel there is has been a higher purpose for making art after-all, but not the purpose I always thought it had – not as an important identity, as a higher calling, and a cool thing to do, but as one of the healing arts.

Art has maybe simply been a cathartic thing for me. It has had healing power – the power to drive me into a place of calm and reflection. Maybe without it I’d been a drunk, a shattered person, a massive jerk, or simply an uninteresting person.

So, I’ll clean out my studio and try not to let that traumatized boy think the worst of it. Instead, I’ll do my best to see all of those clumsy efforts, all of those changes in direction, as a long-term effort to feel better about myself. An effort to know myself through exercises in symmetry, colour, imagination and beauty.  


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Rob O'Flanagan

About the Author: Rob O'Flanagan

Rob O’Flanagan has been a newspaper reporter, photojournalist and columnist for over twenty years. He has won numerous Ontario Newspaper Awards and a National Newspaper Award.
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