The following is an excerpt from The Hungry Artist. In this excerpt, told in first person narrative, an artist is experiencing the pangs of self-doubt and artistic frustration—something that we all have experienced. I believe that any artist should be able to relate to this. In fact, anybody should be able to realte to this. We’ll see. Let me know.
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"I awoke to a rainy noon amid the clutter of my room. The remains of last nights painting session had not been cleared away. Paints, pizza, paint smeared rags, brushes, dishes lay strewn about. I wasn’t in the mood for housework. I putted around, fixing a greasy fried egg sandwich and cup of coffee. I sat on a stool, half-dressed, flipping through an issue of some art magazine. Things were not going well. I stopped painting, surrendering to a feeling that my work was basically aimless and lacked a technique that accomplished artists seem to master so effortlessly. Of course, I knew that they had perfected their craft by studying and practice.
I pushed back my chair and looked at the canvas for a moment sneering at the image. I got up, walking up down the floor. I started to read voraciously, attempting to give myself a do-it-yourself education. My efforts to assimilate myself and find a direction were obsessive. I crammed my schedule with the study of philosophy, art history and painting. I read omnivorously in coffee shops, at home, in parks, the library, everywhere. Jodie [the character's girlfriend] was too tired listening to my ravings about idea’s that I was convinced were changing my life, and I got out of the habit of trying to embroil her in discussion. I was tapping ever deeper into my intellectual and emotional life—discovering the wealth that is the human spirit.
By the time I turned twenty-two, I had achieved an intellectual maturity, a greater facility with drawing than I ever had before. But I still felt anxious and irritable, for I felt that something was amiss. It was all the more frustrating because I couldn’t place my finger on it. I just knew that I hadn’t yet found my “voice” in painting. My art didn’t express completely what I knew I could bring to it. Sitting near my easel, I would skim through a collection of rejection slips—having sent out expensive comps of my art to magazines or newspapers---hoping to be commissioned for anything---and I figured that these people caught on to that which I was beginning to discover: I hadn’t honed my talent yet, not fully. They had every right to reject me. That’s what I thought. I figured the rejection was based on a lack of education in the arts, on a lack of proper training—as if they somehow knew this. How naïve I was, believing that employment prospects would immediately identify my talent and hire me on the spot. After all, strangers and friends alike have confirmed time and again my “obvious talent”—but everybody else, especially those in a position to hire this inspired artist, treated me as if I wasn’t even worthy to paint their garage door. How much rejection can a person take before a spirit crumbles?
Sometimes I felt as if my so-called gift was not more like a curse. I sometimes think that if I had not been endowed by some gift-dispensing God of the universe with the ability to draw, I perhaps would have taken up a more practical career, like accounting or dentistry. But those laments faded when I imagined myself as a non-artist…gazing over the shoulder of some artist saying something stupid like “Wow, that’s really good, I wish I could do that. Why, I can’t even draw a stick man.” But even with the occasional bouts with self-doubt, I decided to press on as if destiny had me favorably included in her plans. There is no getting away from what I am. I am an artist. I will succeed. Period. I need to draw and paint like a drowning man needs air. I am an artist! It is in my blood. And With the burst of energy propelled by this thought---I am an artist—I retrieved my sketchpad as if to rebuke any possible lingering doubt roaming around in my head and I drew, drew, drew!
Leaning on the legs of the chair, I began to sketch with bold and confident pencil strokes and, shaping before me on the clear white paper, a human figure emerges, a highly stylized one. I was caught up in the mania of shading and detailing the drawing and I felt as if the blank page was coming to life, a life that I felt coursing throughout my whole being. I felt a hunger. No matter how much I drew, I could not satisfy the hunger I felt."
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