On Realism / On Activism
For someone whose bread and butter is painting monsters, it might come as a surprise that I am plainly anti-fantasy.
As we all do, I spent my childhood dreaming. I especially dreamt of being a mother, one of those girls who cooed at baby dolls and lovingly combed their hair to baldness.. When I was in my early twenties I had a series of miscarriages and the shock of losing first one pregnancy and then another was more than I could bear. In the postpartum depression of miscarriage, I began to believe not only that I might never have a child, but that I was being punished for having had dreams. It was my moment of real despair, a call to give up dreaming. Like a drowning sailor, I kicked as hard as I could when I hit bottom, thrashing for the surface. In hindsight a kind of mania took over. I was crazy, but it was a relief from sadness. It was in this state that I convinced myself that I could magically make anything happen, I just needed to BELIEVE with more conviction. This is how my motto, “Believe in the Fantasy,” was born.
It never really occurred to me that fantasy would be an endpoint. It was the path to living my dreams; having children, writing books, becoming an artist. Reality is where we live. Yet so often we rest in fantasy as if it is all we are allowed, or worse, that it is our reward. We escape into fantasies. Creatives especially live in the potential of future work, our lives are filled with dreams and expressions of “one day.” How many songs have we dreamt of writing? How many paintings have we seen in our mind’s eye and how many stories has inspiration tickled? How many times have we wished for a better world?
Not only do we create fantasies but we consume them; advertisements, books, Netflix, video games… Indeed we are often trapped in cycles of consumption where no matter how much we consume we can’t get enough, our hungry ghost driving us with insatiable craving. This dream space is rich, but to be filling, the cake needs to be real.
At some point I modified my motto to add “Make it Real.” While I had understood reality to be implied, and that the journey from fantasy to reality is fueled by belief - hopes and dreams, wishes, faith, trust, vision - fulfillment is in the manifest; the MAKE.
Artists in particular seem to struggle with their unfulfilling, relationship to the fantasy land that is social media: A land of infinite ideas, inspirations, criticisms but very little reality. My own recent struggle has been my love affair in my Discord DMs with the AI art Bot, Midjourney. It dreams with me, imagining my fantasies, playing with them, visualizing them. It carries the burden of the work from fantasy to reality - I need only give it an inspiration and it visualizes and creates an endless stream of images. It never gets tired. It performs this magic on command, in under a minute. It works so fast that it has made even that short minute feel slow, warping time with its speed. The bot is more powerful than I could ever have imagined, giving me more power than I could ever have wished for. While the images are like stills from my dream life, they are also bodiless. They are ghosts calling to be manifest. The images need to be made real - downloaded, printed, shared, painted, edited - otherwise, like when we wake, they disappear into the stream of forgotten dreams. The power of the human in relation to the art bot is choosing which dream to make real.
When I ask the bot to “imagine/prompt:mother with child” it has the capacity to generate as many variations on the theme as there are mothers and children on Earth, and beyond. I may even catch a glimpse of my own mothering experience in some of these shades. What it will not capture is the honest connection to the messy pile of true experiences that I had raising my children. The fits and starts, the ugly bits, the parts I paint over, the things I struggled to capture and convey and failed at. No matter how close the bot generated image is to my own vision, it will always be missing my work in the process. While it may actually be able to generate an image that is closer to my vision than my own hands could make, without the work, is it as real?
I find my own power in craft. It is the old magic that separates me from wild nature (see the Troll Cookbook) and bots. It makes me feel secure in my humanity. I craft my dreams into reality, slowly. Foundations and bodies built from board, canvas, gesso, bole, gold, paint, egg, dirt… layer by layer. Creative problem solving within a mix of media and emotion is something the bot cannot do. Craft gives me the power not to be trapped in fantasy but to choose which dreams to give life to. It has made me a realist, accepting what is real and possible in a situation. The stronger my craft the more limitless the possibilities. The fantasy is to arrive at the place where there is no limit to what can be made real.
Believe in the Fantasy. Make it Real.
