The Honey Trap and the Secret Garden

I don’t believe in the commodification of Art.

That is my stance, it HAS been for many years now…

Yet, we Artists live and breathe and we must eat and drink and have shelter to survive.

Yet, we live in a society that values rationality, order, efficiency and the aggregate of monetary value to provide ourselves these basic things.

Therefore, despite my beliefs about the commodification of Art, I still do work for money…

No, not these silly paintings… I illustrate children’s books. Well, actually I wrote and illustrated one book, of which I have been eternally frustrated due to its rushed production and release during the pandemic.

I took a break for a few years, but I came back to it recently after securing representation and so far it’s been very rewarding… But anyway I digress.

Yes, I do work for money… not much money, but enough money to keep me from going completely broke.

Illustration won’t make me a millionaire, definitely not a billionaire… Even ONE of those is one too many.

No, I’m barely comfortable, but I’m making it work somehow. Perhaps more work will yield better rates, but only time will tell.

I’m saying this because, despite all the “practical” and “rational” monetary reasons not to, I’ve all but gone dark on social media. I’ve disengaged despite my “best interests.” I make my work in the relative dark now… I don’t post, I don’t share, I don’t scroll…

I don’t miss it.

I did this for myself, for my sanity. For the psychological truancy that is needed to avoid the honey trap.

And what exactly IS the honey trap? Well… it all started with the promise of the internet and when it came to Instagram, the promise of “exposure,” and “engagement.”

I was an early adopter of that platform, and I quickly garnered an audience of around 10k for an account focused on my illustration work, before the algorithm was implemented. That’s where it capped off for me. It is a very modest number by today’s standards, but back then it was a bigger deal. Nonetheless, it was a trap, and like a bee swallowed by honey, I slowly started to sink into despair.

Yes, it was the comparison, my jealousy of other artists, the fear of seeing my numbers go down. The desperate need to post and remain engaged… It was exhausting, it was devastating and it was entirely designed to be that way.

Shhh, don’t tell anyone.

But really… Why do that? Why trap people in a cycle of comparison and despair?

Because Artists and their Art must be controlled, because if they are not, they might speak truths that are inconvenient for those who designed the traps. Because Art and Artists represent chaos and the antithesis of “Order,” not neatly slotted into a grid.

How can you control the uncontrollable?

This is why the term “creative industry” has always been oxymoronic to me. Yes I operate professionally WITHIN a “creative industry,” but I’m also lucky to work with people who understand sufficiently what a silly term that is.

In the past, I HAVE worked with people who take that term seriously and it’s devastating to witness how soulless some of them are and how proud they are OF it.

That’s why I stopped working with them, that’s why I said goodbye to that era of my career… And that’s why I focused all my efforts towards Painting.

But then, when I threw myself into THAT world, I realized that for all its bluster and preaching, the “Art world” or “World(s)” also took that term seriously… Not only THAT, it was absolutely mired in the honey trap. And unless one already had “generational wealth” it did not cater to people like myself who came from NOTHING.

Yet I was afraid of falling into obscurity, of being one of the countless forgotten Artists that recede into the shadows of generation after generation…

That river current swallowing up talent and beauty for the sake of productivity and acquisition.

It was only until I decided to face that obscurity, to look into that void that I understood.

This garden isn’t for me…

The honey trap I was drowning in would have me believe that I am worthless without its sweet synthetic confines. That without a “like,” without the metrics, without the numbers, my life and my creations are worthless. That I may as well give in, give up that ghost of lost hopes… best of all stop the chaos the uncertainly and the creativity.

I looked at my own obscurity… At a possible end of a life surrounded by paintings that were never shown, passion projects that never got off the ground and instead of fighting that fear I said,

“So be it.”

That acceptance revealed to me a richness of life beyond. A garden that now sits almost completely silent but is yet fertile, not without its share of entropy, but also made richer for it.

Here, I paint for myself, I work on projects that may never be made, I give myself the time to make ugly things and to struggle. I allow myself the room to do nothing. I read, I write. When I win a paid project, I focus entirely on it. I invent and fabricate my own woodworking tools.

Most importantly, if some larger corporate entity comes knocking asking that I expend my energy for THEIR benefit, I say “NO, thank you” and “Talk to my agent…”

This is the place I’d rather be… A garden that I tend and may never see in full bloom. But I know in my heart that when life slips away, I will be proud to have tended it.

I invite you, dear Artists, to join me there.