art and fear

Several years have passed since I visited the Inman Park Arts Festival. It's one of Atlanta's big spring arts festivals, and it's one of our better ones. Sculptors, woodturners, painters, jewelry makers, metalworkers, knitters, and, yes, photographers had art on display today when I visited.

At festivals like this, I always examine the photographers' goods most carefully. It inevitably becomes a little contest. I size up their photos. I mercilessly compare the quality of their work to mine. I create an imaginary graph with x and y axes and see who scores the strongest. (It's really kind of ridiculous.)

Today I saw some mediocre work there, and some really beautiful work. I saw some stuff that I really enjoyed. I even splurged on a wonderful black-and-white print from a north Georgia artist who shoots beautiful nudes.

It was only when I got home from the festival that I started to reflect on the uselessness of my little comparison game. Setting up a contest like that is basically an exercise in envy. It yields mostly resentment.

It occurs to me that these anxious feelings are an almost constant companion for my photography right now, to one degree or another.

It's a good indication that I need to re-program some of my thinking.

Julia Cameron might as well have been there with me today as I mercilessly eyed the artists' wares:

"Jealousy is always a mask for fear: fear that we aren't able to get what we want; frustration that somebody else seems to be getting what is rightfully ours even if we are too frightened to reach for it. At its root, jealousy is a stingy emotion. It doesn't allow for the abundance and multiplicity of the universe. Jealousy tells us that there is room for only one — one poet, one painter, one whatever you dream of being..."

As you might guess, carrying around an attitude like this tends to drain a lot of the fun out of art. It flavors the artistic process with bitterness — rather than the natural sweetness of playing, enjoying, noticing, exploring.

I've felt for a while now that I'm at a threshold with my photography. I think today's experience at the Festival was just another reminder that I need to keep pushing to get into grad school. It's not even a particular degree I'm after — it's the structure of the curriculum, and the opportunity to learn new things while gaining a clearer sense of what my own work is about.

I want to pursue school mostly because I'm not doing myself any favors by staying in this small and petty place with my art. Sure, I want to take better photographs. I also want to get myself to a more open place, and stroll through the Festival with a desire to celebrate every piece of art I run across.