How To Work Out What You Really Want
The pandemic has presented us all with a unique opportunity for reflection, to contemplate where we’re at with our lives, where we’d like to go next and who we’d like to go there with. The same applies to our artistic careers. What have we achieved so far? What are with happy with and where’s the next level or dimension?
These curious questions are normally avoided, remaining silent in the cloud that everyday life throws over us. However, we all now have the platform to consider what we really want from life, but where to start? How can we discover what we really want? With big questions can come a haze of uncertainty in the absence of immediate answers. Here are three questions to ask yourself that may help the process.
1. What do you not want?
Both a curator and a designer recently told me that when engaging with collectors and clients who are uncertain of what they would like, they instead recommend that they describe what they don’t like, what they hate, what they’d never warm to in a million month of Sundays. Understanding what you don’t want and why you don’t want or like something will help get you to the heart of where the considered life lay.
For example, as a visual artist you may decide that you hate the idea of being an overtly commercial artist or you may hate the idea of being a starving artist or you may hate the idea of not having a work/life balance or perhaps the opposite.
What would you not want for your career, your art and your lifestyle? And why is this? Grapple, dice and slice and the answers will begin to materialise.
2. What would a considered life look like from the other side?
Rather than taking the perspective of where you are today looking forward, what would your ideal life look like nearer the end, looking back?
Whilst this may sound disturbingly morbid, visualising yourself in old age looking back on your life is to date is one of the most interesting and liberating exercises I have personally engaged with when it comes to weighing up what’s important.
Through this lens, the everyday details and anxieties of present day life fall by the wayside as the vivid colours of memorable moments and treasured relationships wash through. This exercise is often known as ‘The Rocking Chair’, and such is my intrigue for this perspective-changer this is the second time I’ve mentioned it in a Wingman article! Give it a try for yourself below.
3. What’s an effective way of researching the options and getting your hands dirty?
Pablo Picasso once said "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working", and the same applies to working out what you want from life and you career; you need to get your hands in the clay to fully find the form. So what’s the best way you could do that?
After moving through the first two points you may for example decide that you would like to pursue a career pushing your personal painting practice to the heights of a Jenny Saville or a Glenn Brown. Further to desk research and physically developing your work, why not also reach out to Saville or Brown or an artist carving out a similar path, or a curator, manager, agent or dealer that engages with their work to discover the true ins, outs, pitifuls and sacrifices that this direction requires? Is it still right for you? Does their feedback open up new possibilities that you’ve not yet considered? Engage in dialogue and actions with the right people, and in the warring words of Shia LaBeouf, ‘Just Do It’ whilst reflecting and questioning regularly to edge closer and closer to what makes you completely content.
In conclusion, if you can get yourself into a position where you have a clearer vision of what you want from life and what a considered life means to you, the good news is that you’re already a step ahead of the rest, as most will tragically not even give this fundamental question a second thought during their sole existence on earth.
The bad news is that having a compelling vision for a considered life is relatively easy, creating a plan and making it happen is more difficult; and whichever direction you point yourself in you will need to keep yourself grounded at all times when it comes to maintaining financial buoyancy - no shady financial risks off the back of a Secret-esque call to the Universe please! Wishing for something alone is not enough!
Creating a clear vision is however the first foundation, a fundamental strength from which to apply yourself, get your hands dirty and experience a truly considered life.