I'm a very burnt-out artist and I think I've been burnt-out for a long, long time. I shot out of college, eager to make this dream happen. I worked as an apprentice for a year and then started on a big commission. I worked with another artist and as our relationship became tangled in life and in the work, I became unraveled. We finished the commission just in time, but that year I had hardly slept and I had cried more than any other time in my life. I was spent. When things dissolved I was broke, applying for and being rejected by grants and awards. I did win one award, though. It sent me to Lyme, Connecticut for a sculpture competition and one of the worst weeks of my life. When I returned to my home in Maryland, I was severely depressed. For seven months I had no work, and hardly any friends. I lost weight. I could barely get out of bed every day. The only thing that brought me to the studio every day was the responsibility of feeding Ivan the studio cat, who was my only friend at that time.
During this time of severe depression, I was competing for a big commission to sculpt Joseph and Mary in marble for a church in Potomac. It took months and months for the church to determine the winner. It was the summer before my twenty-fifth birthday.
Just after my birthday, I was awarded the job and life seemed to be looking up. I worked on small models of the sculptures in preparation for the large ones. That summer I found the studio of my dreams and spent a lot of time fixing it up, painting it and making it mine. I thought that I had arrived in the Promised Land. I started work on the enlarged sculptures. I was lonely. Painfully lonely. Months would pass without touching another person. My mother would visit. I just wanted a hug. I'd go out dancing, just for the joy of human contact. I was an extrovert; I couldn't do this.
Finally, I got a part-time job at the local college down the street. It was my lifeline. Not only did I now have some supplemental income and health insurance, but I could eat at the dining hall for only a few dollars and be there with other people. I had students who worked in my office who I would grow to dearly love. Many of these students are grown now and getting married or off to graduate school. I feel like a proud mother hen.
Completing those two giant sculptures was agonizing. Every time I heard about someone who'd wake up every day excited about his job, I'd want to throw my shoe at him. I was living the dream and yet I dreaded every day. How could it be possible?
While I was working on this insurmountable project, I was asked to do things that were beyond my maturity level. I was importing marble, working with a broker, working with different sub-contractors- enlarging, casting, carving, models, installation, the client. I had a hundred problems that I had to solve. I had to find a customs broker. I had a crew of Italian carvers working in Italy. I was not yet thirty years old.
Somehow the project was completed. It was only by the grace of God, for I was incapable on my own. I got married in 2005, closed my dream studio, left my job at the college and got really really lost artistically. I moved the studio into our basement, but I could not work in isolation. So, I got a group studio in Kemp Hall, downtown Frederick. In many ways, I accomplished a lot of personal work there. Unfortunately, the studio was in the hole and I had to take out of loan to pay my rent and cast some pieces. we had to leave Kemp Hall, so I moved my studio back to fifth street, but in a different location. Then it happened. The Move. The Big Transition. I closed that studio in December 2008 and haven't had one since. That loan still haunts me and keeps my studio from moving forward. I cannot afford one more thing. This means no models, no studio, no new materials.
My whole life I've wanted nothing more than to be an artist. I went to college with the intention of being a working artist; I was an apprentice to a very successful sculptor; I took on big commissions and ran my own studio for seven years. Here I am, on the eve of thirty-two totally burnt out on art. I think about art all of the time; it haunts me. Yet, however I've been doing it has not worked for me. The isolation, the business of it, the deadlines and clients. It has nearly killed my spirit.
I am an extrovert. I am a visionary. God made me this way. I cannot work in isolation. I do not flourish. I whither and die. Many artists work alone, but there are those of us who are cannot.
My next creative task is raising a child. There is no person on earth more creative than the human child. I haven't forgotten about making art and about my calling, but I refuse to let it destroy me like it nearly did.
