Friends become Critics

Artist's are solitary beings. They thrive alone in studios and rooms. Quietly pushing paint into odd shapes scratching marks with sticks of chalk, lead pencils or pens. Unless that is their critics have managed to invade their solitude and upset their creative spirit. If they are friends even worse fellow artists too the hurt and frustration is even more irritatingly wounding. The fertile imaginative mind is unsettled pitched into the everyday habit of common squabbling mankind. The old rivalries and loves the artist's friends once shared now cast an ominous grotesque shadow on the neglected canvas. The symbiosis of youth has become in old age a Laocoon of writhing snakes. The page is spoilt the ink has dried up phone calls and comments are unwelcome. The friend has become a negative critic sniping from the backseat of past confidences. On life's long journey the friend next to you has become a pecking demonic bird pushing us from the nest of early trust into the road . Settling hidden grievances expressing malice rubbing out the old soft sketches of previous lives together with the mouth grinding circle of the acrid strokes and bitter tongue their true shabby nature is revealed. That seems to be the fate of all small men's idea of other larger men in history. In their ruthless search for self meaning friend's must be exposed and giants cut down at the knees no saints will be fashioned here but we will all go down in the mud of failure with the inevitable thud of silence with a dwarf towering over them. Or that is the small man's hope. The artist after all is like all men he bleeds if you cut him he hurts if you abuse him but he dies if you criticise him.
I have always been the best judge of my own work and the direction it should take. That does not mean that I have not made bad pictures or gone off the true path of my divine vocation. I have seen my past work at times to be sickly sweet or pretentious or crude. That is all part of developing skills and growing as we all humans do hopefully getting a little wiser and gaining experienced on the way. I can forgive myself but not my unsolicited critic. What business is it of anyone what I do? Unless it is a commission they are paying for or they are that rare being a skilled person and "the experienced teacher". If we have elevated someone to the position of judge we risk good or bad useful or useless comments. It is best to keep your own council with regard to your own work that is my experience. I have my inner guide and teacher my instinct and my fate. What need have I for the average comment of smaller men? The artist is often like Marseyus flayed alive by small people for his presumption of being what God gave him but worse still by his own opinion of himself . It is the knife welded by the greatest tyrant ourselves. This we really must avoid. But if we are truly happy with ourselves accepting of our limitations and working from inner necessity then we can know our own greatness. Those who cannot see our endeavours as connecting to our own spirit and life story are simply out of touch. They are ignorant blind men. They can be excused but if they are intent on venting their own frustrations on us and express a hidden jealousy we are better travelling alone than with a malicious fool.