Artist, Not Bookkeeper
There are no gold stars!
Last Sunday, I lingered for a while in the paint aisle of the hardware store, trying to remember the materials I already had at the studio. It wasn’t long before another customer, a middle-aged man in Carhartt, approached me. He picked up a paint set wrapped in plastic, complete with rollers, trays, and tape, and tried to hand it to me. “This is what you need,” he said. Wrong.
Dear reader, lately I’ve been thinking about the unsolicited and often terrible advice people offer. Given that I’m a woman trying to do anything, I was born a walking target for suggestions.
Making art in the public eye and running a business intensifies the rate at which people try to tell me what to do. A life of art, adventures, and experiments creates an overflow of advice-giving opportunities.
What’s confusing is that the more I prove I can take care of myself through my endeavors, which is how I currently measure my success, the more advice I seem to get. I thought the inverse would be true. It makes sense to offer advice to somebody waving their arms for a safety buoy, but I’ve never floundered. I trust in the process, even when it’s hard.