My art isn't free

Nor is yours.

I was on Amazon ordering a couple of new sketchbooks — Hahnemühle, A5, 100% cotton, one of my favorites. At checkout: $47.28. For two little books.

It got me thinking. How much have I spent on making art over the years?

Five colored pencil sets. A drawer full of ink bottles. A hundred markers. Eight or nine watercolor sets. A couple dozen brushes. I’ve tried out so many brands of pens, settled on one, bought a crate of them. A month later, changed my mind.

Art books. Art instruction books. Art history books. Books by artists. Books about artists.

iPads. Computers. Cameras. Software. Internet service to watch other people use all of the above.

I’ve spent money on things I use every day — and things I fully intend to use but never get around to.

When my friend Tom showed me his new ultralight folding camp stool, I had to have one — even though I already own three others. I dropped a hundred bucks on it for my trip to Mexico, only to discover it was banned from the museums. It just sat in my backpack the whole trip. Now it sits in a closet, alongside the markers and pastels and metallic pens and graphite sticks that I honestly, truly do plan to use one day.

Maybe.

And then there’s time. So much of it.

A few hours a week, sometimes a few hours a day, for twenty-five years — filling sketchbook pages just to put them on a shelf. Time spent polishing my skills, experimenting, redoing. Time studying what other people do and feeling jealous and awed by their abilities.

What does that add up to?

But those aren’t the only costs.

There’s the cost of feeling incompetent. Of thinking I’ll never learn to draw properly, of scrabbling for a new idea and coming up dry. The uncertainty that I’ll ever have another idea, or that my idea will be any good, or that I’ll be able to execute it. That my skills will atrophy or never develop further. That people won’t like what I make. That it won’t be worth anybody’s time.

The cost to my ego of comparing myself with other people.

The cost to my confidence of struggling with the monkey voice in my head.

And the cost of dredging up raw materials I can’t order from Amazon: childhood memories, fears of aging, conflict, darkness. The cost of digging into myself, of letting my subconscious surface things that had been safely buried.

I don’t sell my art. But it isn’t free.

That’s only half the ledger.

I get to play every day. I get to sit at my table, open a sketchbook, uncork my bottles of ink, open my boxes of colored pencils. I get to draw faces and animals, places and snacks.

I get to try things and experiment. The fun of discovery — what’s going to happen if I do this? What will it be like to try that? Where will this idea take me? I get to splash ink and draw wonky lines and fail without it being a disaster. I get to learn from all kinds of experiences and people.

Those are the everyday pleasures.

And then there are the deeper ones.

I love solving creative problems, figuring out how to do something that seems impossible, or combining things that shouldn’t go together. I love learning how to use a tool in a way that finally brings to life an idea that’s been lodged in my head. I love the delight of seeing something on the page that I can’t believe I made — and how that makes me feel inside, and how that makes me feel about myself.

I love sharing something I’ve made and having a stranger respond to it. Having someone I don’t know tell me it moved them, gave them insight, changed something in their life.

When I made my animated film, The Artist Who Couldn’t Draw, I had this incredible feeling of having brought two creatures to life. The main characters had personalities and worlds, goals and struggles — all of which had come entirely from my imagination. Every day I went back to work with them, it was fulfilling in a way I struggle to describe. I’ve had that feeling writing stories and a novel too.

I’ve created my own time machine through journaling — it takes me back to times in my life I thought were lost and gives me fresh insight into them.

And my art helped me heal. It walked beside me through the hardest times — my first wife’s accident and her death, and the pandemic. My sketchbooks have carried me through confusion and grief. Their pages have shown me the beauty in my life when I couldn’t see it myself.

How do I put a price on that?

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. Final reminder: My live workshop, Dive into Dip Pens, takes place tomorrow morning. You have a few hours left to sign up and get the full recording too. Click here for more. See you there!