At Soul Survivor this year I only sold two paintings which kind of crushed me a little*. The previous year I sold almost all the paintings I made – and I didn’t even like them! This year, when I put so much of myself into them and only sold two, it made me feel massively rejected.
Ok, so I know that this year there was a bit of a different crowd and sometimes people just aren’t in the right mood for art. I also know that I can’t expect everyone to love my art…or anyone for that matter. It’s just that for my entire life, this has been the one thing that I have been good at. I got an art award at school, my friends and family are always going on about my creativity – which, let’s be honest, I was quite ok with. That was me, Blair the creative one.
For the last year I have been toying with the idea of having my own shop and selling my art for a living. I know that this would involve a lot of hard work, but I was confident that there were people out there that would buy it. When this Soul Survivor market stall came up, I had it in my head that it was test to see if I would be successful.
So after getting to the end of the market, and only having sold two paintings, both to people I know, I felt a little more than mildly depressed. The one thing that I was good at was rejected.
I almost laughed. A friend of mine told me to “not take it personally”. Not take it personally? I put so much of myself into those paintings. How could I not take it personally?
I spent the next couple of days wondering what next. Maybe I wasn’t creative. Maybe people were just being nice. Was my art actually any good? If I wasn’t good at art, what was I good at then?
My entire identity was shaken. It still is a bit.
At Young Adults this week, our pastor and his wife came to talk to us about there experience of prophecy and the importance of it. One thing that’s really stuck in my mind is that whatever God gives you, give it away. So God has given me creativity (I think), I should use that for Him. But how?
It was really weird. I was thinking about all this yesterday and my job and my life and how I’m living from CD to CD. I was making coffee for one of the 1:45 regulars when one of them asked me “If you could get paid to do something that you love and get paid for it, what would you do?” I immediately said, “Paint and make stuff”. How funny.
So that ’s me at the moment. Just so you know.
*Understatement of the year.
