What are your goals as an artist?

This is such a serendipitous question as I graduated on Saturday with my M.F.A. (yes!) and I need to focus on what is the next step and what does that look like.

On my pragmatic page it looks like my need to create a list of goals of what I need to accomplish to “make it” in the art world. I need to put on my business hat and create a website, a marketing strategy, apply to shows and galleries with proper documentation. I have to update my business cards. I have to search for opportunities and it goes on and on. My goals need to be carefully mapped out for me to make it all happen. It is a high-risk business and my product is my art and my grand vision.

My ultimate goal is to be self-sustaining artist creating, selling my work and teaching art. I also want to open a healing arts studio, which I call the Green House Studios. This would be a community space for new paradigm artists and thinkers to build alternative systems in various communities. Ideally it would create an all-inclusive dialogue about art and its ability to empower. This would include art workshops, gallery space, and community outreach art programs. Lauren and I speak about this Blog as the virtual beginnings of such a studio.

For me, equally mystifying, is my passion for what I am doing. Pragmatism seems to fly out the window as I create the work that I need to do. I became very comfortable just being a conduit and having creativity flow through me. I have come to believe that I am merely a channel for something greater than me that manifests through my art. As the artist Paul Klee wrote, “the artist does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules —- He transmits…. he is merely a channel.”

My personal quest is to reunite art and the spirit. Akin to the alchemist’s work, which is the transformation of gross material into spiritual substance, I see my art as artifacts of my ever-transforming consciousness. My art and its process represent a humble quest to resurrect divination in my personal journey and into the community at large. As an artist my work gives the viewer a personal glimpse of my internal revelations.I speak of divination in its broadest sense, meaning that through my art and process I find myself in a continuum of discovering the unknown within myself and in the world that I live in. The motives and impulses behind my creative process are my shamanistic belief that through the process of creation, I align with dynamism and the divinity that is animated in all life.

Another goal of my work is revelation. I believe the core social issue that I am exploring in my painting, photography, site-specific works, and my teaching is abuse, which plagues society and the planet Earth. My approach to this work is not criticism, but a gentle revelation of what was and what can be. In all my work I explore and reveal the shadow of humanity by facing it, bringing it to surface, and on a personal level, finding a way to transform it.

To surmise, essentially my goal as an artist is the marriage of the paradox between pragmatism and pure creativity. As well as my service to the world at large. On an interpersonal level one could say that my art is my Yoga, the discipline that promotes the unity within myself. Carl Jung called this individuation.
I apologize for this got a little wordy.

Namaste, Lisa

I am interested in hearing what are your goals as an artist. How do you keep one foot in each world to make art your life and profession?

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