I’m riffing off a meme somebody posted on Facebook today. Like, are you still an artist if you work a day job and don’t have time to create “art” or haven’t created art in a while? It’s a question I have wrestled with from time to time.

I was an uber good musician as a kid/young woman. I could probably have made some kind of career out of that albeit probably not a Jean Pierre Rampal or Lizzo type of career. But I didn’t. I took an entry level tech job because it paid better (actually my first tech job paid like crap but we won’t go there today). I also love to create colorful fiber art stuff but I haven’t done that in a while either. Because I don’t have a lot of time because I have a highly paid (for me) tech job now.

But what defines “art”? I have spent more of my adult life messing around with spreadsheets, programming computers, and writing documents of various sorts than performing music or creating visual art. I’m not sure if I have the bandwidth to articulate what I’m trying to say but there is “art” in almost everything we do. Engineers (one of my lots in life) often drive me crazy but they are also artists.

Communicating information via an elegant spreadsheet is every bit as artistic as painting a landscape or performing a Bach flute sonata. In my current job, among other things, I write functional specifications to clearly describe what our online banking application does. This involves writing but also calls for fitting in flowcharts and other diagrams, tables, and detailed annotated screenshots from the high fidelity html prototype of our application that I code. Is that not artistic? I certainly would like to think it is although it may not be appreciated by a wide audience. But who cares?

Of course, not all jobs offer opportunities to be creative and many people have to deal with toxic job situations. This is a complicated topic and I don’t have all the answers or even all the questions. This is just a rudimentary attempt to put my life experiences into words. We are ALL artists in our own way. I do get that someone who loves to paint (for example) feels frustrated at not having enough time to PAINT because they have to pay rent and put food on the table.

P.S. The photo is from October 2012 at the moomincabin. There is no snow here or there this October. Here on The Planet t-storms are rolling through. We need them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 12th, 2024 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.