Warding Off Bitterness
Last year, I watched a TikTok video where Kiersten Lyons, an actor, was hilariously recounting all her many misfortunes in love and career. Her whole video read like a voyage of self-discovery through rejection, a tale familiar to anyone pursuing a creative life. It was part of a trend on the app that encouraged creators to pair their comeback stories with a gospel song: In the Sanctuary by the Kurt Carr Singers. In the Sanctuary is one of those songs that seems to end, but then a few moments later, starts up again. And this plays out over and over, to almost comic effect, until you don’t know if it will ever end. And it really struck me as an analogy that could be widely applied to all the arts.
In the video, Lyons dances in overalls in her living room with a big goofy smile while telling the tragic tale about moving to LA to become an actor at age 21. She’s told she’s not attractive enough for parts. She falls in love with a male model who cheats on her and bails two months before their wedding. She starts writing as a form of therapy, then writes an entire one-person play about her experience called Crushed. A big producer sees it and offers to pitch it to a major TV network, but then ghosts her. Later a booking agency shows interest in it, and she restages the whole thing. They buy tickets in advance to attend the show, only to ALSO ghost. Cut to her picking up the pieces, trying to regroup again after this final blow in a long line of disappointments.
Sound familiar? Way too familiar? Uncomfortably familiar?
Her video got me thinking about bitterness lately and how to keep it at bay as an artist. I don’t know about you, but I’ve personally got rejected from everything I’ve tried for this year. And it’s so easy to get discouraged and catch a sullen case of the “why bothers”? To make myself feel better, I decided to check out people who had had long careers and who maybe didn’t get “discovered” until later, and how they dealt with years of working in obscurity. How did they persevere and finally find an audience for their work?
In Enrique Martinez Celaya’s book On Art and Mindfulness (my new favorite book), he says: “Navigating a career is not easy. Expect to be thrown about by rejections, indignities and by your own ambitions.” He speaks of the challenges of having to contend with “your own doubts and limitations as well as the loneliness that comes with setting yourself upon the artist’s course in the first place” and advises, “find beacons that guide you and meanings that sustain you.”
So what are some beacons we can look to? Unfortunately, we can’t look to Marsden Hartley. Fairfield Porter once encountered Hartley at an exhibition and found him “bitter and contemptuous” and a bit sneery. But ultimately, he couldn’t help feeling compassion for him. In an exchange of letters with the American poet, John Brooks Wheelwright, Porter wrote about Hartley, “he is a real artist, who deserves better treatment from the world.” And in response to a critique by Wheelwright that Hartley was a competent but “lifeless” painter, Porter replied, “Hartley’s still lifes have more life than for instance, Grant Wood’s people.” Agreed, Hartley’s still lifes punch you in the face with their crude black outlines and sheer physicality, making each delicate seashell or pink flower seem as heavy as a boulder. In his hands, paint is teeming with life.
It’s easy to say bitterness is a colossal waste of time (because of course it is), and that we should all focus on gratitude and the work. And yes to all that. But it’s still hard to avoid getting scorched by the fiery hot coals of bitterness. Even a great painter like Marsden Hartley let it eat him alive. It flirts with all of us at different times of our lives.
But back to the beacons. Who can we use as talismans against the bitter brew?
First, I thought of Louise Bourgeois, who didn’t get discovered by the art world until her 60s when the feminist movement was getting going. They plucked her (and her jam-packed studio full of years of unseen work) out of obscurity and thrust her straight into the limelight. In the book Runaway Girl by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, she’s quoted as having said, “My first experience of great luck was that I was not picked up by the art scene and I was left to work by myself. I did not consider I was ignored. I considered that I was being blessed by privacy.”
Secondly, I loved what painter Carmen Herrera said in an interview with Grace Bonney in Town & Country: “As time passes and you make pictures and works that hardly anyone notices, then self-confidence kicks in. Being ignored can feel like a form of freedom to do whatever you want. But the thing is to go on doing—do not give up! On the contrary: Do more and enjoy! To hell with fame and acclaim. . . it is fleeting.”
In Thirteen Artists Give Advice to Their Younger Selves by Alexxa Gotthardt on Artsy, Laurie Simmons advises, “Don’t panic when nothing is going on in your career…it’s the best time to work—unencumbered and with no deadlines. Just figure out how to stay alive and appreciate those periods of freedom…Stay in the present if at all possible.”
And by staying in the present, we only know one thing: we are making the work we need to make right now. The things of the future that we can’t know are: We’ll never make it; We’ll never win that grant; We’ll never get into that gallery; We’ll never be successful enough to not claim a loss on our taxes (That’s a personal one for me). We’ll never catch a break or find enough time to work, get into that residency, or ever be “known.” In a way, bitterness is the result of sucking on the sour apple flavored Jolly Rancher of envy. We see others’ successes, and we are reminded of what we lack.
Just open Instagram and it’s a literal bulletin board of what other artists are achieving. It can feel like a smack in the face. Then, the loser vibes descend. Also, it seems like every day some new researcher is popping out of Yale or Harvard with a demoralizing study about how hard it is for artists to succeed. They aren’t totally wrong, but why do we have to read about it? Our friend, Carmen Herrera, offers comfort in that same Town & Country interview, “The key is not to be at the mercy of statistics. Find something you love to do and never retire.” Stats can only show us the past, and the future can’t be known. It’s crucial to not let the bastards get us down. No matter the pie chart, we’re not stopping. We desire later generations of artists to see us and take inspiration from our courageous, creative, crystalline hearts. If the art world is overlooking right now, then we ourselves need to make space for the overlooked (through writing, curating, exhibiting, sharing, blogging, and recommending).
Bitterness is a slippery slope from envy into the fear that we have failed. We’re a flop. It’s over. Take the “L.” But Bryan E. Robinson says in Psychology Today in his article The Bitter Pill You Must Swallow if You Want Success that “failure is a frame of mind. You don’t actually fail until you choose to put that label on yourself. When you call yourself a failure, you start to feel, think, and behave like one… Failure and success are flip sides of the same coin – twins, not enemies.” He goes on to offer this bit of tough love: “Smack-down moments are unavoidable, and success is built on them. Avoidance of failure turns into avoidance of success. It might be a bitter pill to swallow, but to attain what you want, you must be willing to accept what you don’t want.”
And what if the statisticians are right and most of us are doomed? What does their definition of “doomed” mean? Are we living in the fourth dimension creatively and making mindboggling astounding art? Are we loving the act of working and seeing how deep into our craft and ourselves we can go? Are we surrounded by stalwart artist friends that can lend support and a critical eye? What is the meaning of hitting that top echelon of success? Success has its own downside. Extreme market pressures can stifle creative risk and encourage product making. Who among us would be 100% immune when money and critical acclaim are in the offing? Enrique Martinez Celaya says, “Handling success can be as treacherous as handling failure. Many say, ‘I won’t be corrupted,’ but experience shows us something different.” His words are a good reminder to take advantage of those pressure-free under-the-radar times and use them wisely for experimentation and for honing our unique voice.
There’s freedom in no one giving a damn. The state of feeling ignored can be a glorious fallow field where the weeds of creativity grow wild and tall. Let’s get freaky while nobody’s looking. One of my favorite comedians, Maria Bamford, said something so profound on a podcast that I lovingly and painstakingly played and paused it to get a full transcription. It’s about staying in the creative moment, no matter where you are in your career. She said, “Totally be yourself. Do what you love. And even if you’re the only person who loves it, at least you’ll love yourself. It doesn’t get any better in creativity. When you have more prestige, it’s always the same amount of joy. So don’t wait to enjoy yourself. If you’re already feeling stressed and like you’ve got to get somewhere, that is not going to change twelve years later or 20 years later. You’re always going to feel that way. So, enjoy, enjoy. Because this is all there is.”
All that talk of joy made me think about how kids make art. They seem to revel in the surprise and pleasure that comes from the act itself. A child is open to trying anything and rarely self-edits. They don’t negatively compare themselves to others because they’re entranced with their own expressive experience. This reminded me of Shunryu Suzuki’s Beginner’s Mind Philosophy from Zen Buddhism: “In the beginner’s mind, there is no thought: ‘I have attained something.’ All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something. The beginner’s mind is compassionate, it is boundless.”
And never bitter.
And so, to recap: there’s no success without the twin of failure. Privacy yields the best work, so let’s use it while we’ve got it. Enjoy making because that’s the only real constant in an artist’s life. Let’s be beginners and be like a gospel song that keeps coming back strong just when they think we’re out of the game.
About the writer: Amy Talluto is a multimedia artist working in painting, sculpture and collage who lives in Upstate NY and hosts a podcast called “Pep Talks for Artists.” This written piece can be listened to as an audio essay in podcast form, as well as many others on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere you get your podcasts. Amy Talluto’s monthly column “Whisperings from the Wormhole” will bring you artist-to-artist pep talks with topics ranging from self-doubt to artists who make work in their kitchens.