DIGGING // THE TEST

 DIGGING // THE TEST

originally published November 24, 2018 on now defunct tedpackard.com

When I was 16, the guidance counsellor had us all take a career predictor test. As I answered the computer’s questions, an unsurprised certainty grew in me. I knew where this was headed, and I was excited. After all, a typical page of “notes” for me was mostly doodles and drawings spilling over from the margins, invading the spare, few words on the life of some european white guy or an algebra formula. 

Artist. The test said, “ARTIST.”

When the counsellor came around with everyone’s printouts, which contained advice on pursuing one’s computed destiny, she paused by me. “Hmm, this isn’t a very practical option. You should focus on something different and have this as a back-up.”

I hardly heard her. I held the packet with “ARTIST” spread across its front, and imagined a life filled with color, with great works grown from my deepest dreams. I shrugged off her dismissal with the self-assurance that 16 year-olds distill for the “practical” advice of Old People. 

But some part heard. Deep inside, her words latched on to a thousand other tiny growths, messages from the culture that spewed out of every TV show, text book, teacher, preacher, and politician. Well below the surface of teenage cool, I was getting square, and I was getting scared. 

I was growing the doubt that I would fight ever after. It would express itself insidiously, especially when close to the heart of a pure expression of art. 

When someone looked at my art and said, “I’d get a tattoo of that,” I would say something nice, but dismissive. 

When my art was on our band’s posters, I thought, “Well, people just like it because of the music.”

When my songs were stuck in people’s heads, I thought, “They like a lot of bad music, too.”

And I’m done with that. I’ve spent a lifetime apologizing for being an artist, making myself small in the face of praise, confusing self-effacement for humility.

What is true is that I AM an artist. I make music that I love. I draw and paint and burn and weave. I tell stories that make my life make more sense for the telling. I write words that move people. All of this moves people. This is what I do, and it is my deepest desire to live an honest life, one where I make exactly what is burning to come out, and to share that without apology or qualification. 

And while we’re setting intentions, here it is: I intend to live a life fully supported in making and sharing my art.

That’s where Patreon comes in. This is where you come in. 

Making a living as an artist is a battle between consumerism and integrity. The culture says, “Make a Product! Get Customers!” The artist says, “I made this, and I feel something, do you feel something?”

My commitment to myself and to you is that what I offer through Patreon is honest. The music that I post, the art I send out in the mail, the videos I make, are exactly what must come out of me, regardless. I will resist the whisper of materialism which says, “…make them a little thing, you owe them somethhhhing…special…” I will listen to my heart, which says, “WOOD BURN EVERYTHING and make a time lapse video and try making prints with it and put that great song you like with it because it’s going to BE GREAT!!” And, well, if you’re still here, you’ll probably like that. 

If something resonates with you, please tell me! Write in the comments, send me an email. I’m curious about the interaction between my work and others. You always see something that I didn’t see, hear something I didn’t hear, and that discovery is a richness that only comes from talking about it.

I am not an artist who imagines, in perfect detail, the completed work. I am a traveler in the woods, following a trail. As I write, as I draw, as I play notes, as I speak, the way is changed by the making. The next step is often not possible, not knowable, until I turn around to see the tracks in the ground. I make art like one lives a life. All things cannot be planned, all ends cannot be known. It is in the living that the patterns emerge, and so it is for my art. 

Maybe because it is always a surprise, maybe because the lines I draw mirror the wrinkles I’ve grown in my brain, but the result is this: my art is my favorite. It makes my heart sing. It fascinates me. More than any selfie, more than any mirror or video, when I look at a finished piece of my own art, when I hear my own music, I am transfixed, as if I have just seen the deepest part of myself, somehow visible to the outside world. 

I love it. I can sit staring at my own wood-burning, my own painting, for hours. I listen to my own music more than any other. I keep finding new connections - a melody that surfaces in three different keys over the course of two years of recordings. Shapes, nested curves and lines that expand from each other and reach across time from my high school doodling into an adult’s controlled stroke. 

Even when I encounter a new medium, I am immediately snared, enamored, and hypnotized by what I create. A new instrument, never touched before; I’ll be lost in the world of that new sound for hours. The first watercolor painting I did as an adult became a contest-winning t-shirt. That wood-burning piece I just finished was supposed to be the learning sampler: it was the first time I’d ever picked up that tool.

And I am as surprised as anyone. But I am probably more enamored than anyone, too. It feeds my soul in ways that nothing else does, to see my insides somehow represented on the outside. It’s vulnerable. It’s also deeply moving. When someone loves my work, they are urging on a hidden healing that reaches through time into the oldest hurts that this body has. 

I don’t understand how it happens, but I am always watching, always fascinated.

In his excellent book, On Writing, Stephen King likens the craft to archaeology. He says writing is not an act of creation, but of discovery, of unearthing and clearing away to reveal the form that was buried there the whole time. 

I like that. And hearing about it made me a better archaeologist. 

That’s all for now.

There’s digging to do.

Animas River Valley, Colorado

December 6, 2018

“To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.”

- David Whyte