“But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.”

Albert Camus

When I take the dogs for a walk at night, I often do an out-and-back route, and in the wintertime that literally implies retracing my own steps in the fresh snow. No matter how many times I do it, I’m always a little surprised at how meandering my path ended up being – so different from what I had perceived as a straight and efficient forward motion.

As I look back on this year, that same principle extrapolates to my own evolution, if I were to take stock of where I began the year, where I am now, and how I got from one point to the other.

There’s a lot of good, a lot of satisfaction that I can draw from the last twelve months. I definitely feel like I have evolved and progressed as an artist, and that I can even begin to take ownership of that word – artist – as a title. I recently read an article about how skill develops, and the four basic phases are:

Unconscious incompetence

Conscious incompetence

Conscious competence

Unconscious competence

I am straddling points two and three at the moment. And consequently, there is a mix of pure enthusiasm and joy from simply creating, with the awareness and responsibility of meeting standards, as well as the corollary of not meeting them. I know I’ve made lots of good progress, but I’m equally cognizant that there is much more work and progress still to come. That’s both comforting and daunting. I love to learn, and progress is rewarding in and of itself, but I am also terribly afraid not so much of failing, but of not being instantly good at something, of struggling. I have to wrestle with that every time I produce a photograph, a poem, a drawing or a painting. That’s the blessing and the curse of moving beyond the exuberant ignorance of the unconscious incompetence phase: my work will never be as good as I want it to be; in fact most of the time I will see nothing but the weaknesses and errors and inadequacies. However, the fact that I have learned, practiced and improved in the exercise is worth all those risks and negatives.

I’ve also learned that I am abysmal at selling what I create, and generally in selling myself. Simply put, I don’t perceive value, neither in one nor the other, the self or the creations. It’s part of the fabric of who I am, and nobody can convince me otherwise. I don’t necessarily mean selling in the specific sense of assigning monetary value, but rather in the general sense of pointing out value to others, convincing them of merit or worth. That kind of thing actually makes me squirm.

Creating something is an intensely personal experience, and sharing it requires exposing one’s entire vulnerability to the wider world, one which is notoriously unkind, be it actively or passively. The process is uncomfortable, and I don’t enjoy it, not on any scale grand or small. Of all of the drawings and paintings that I have done for people and given to them this year, reactions have ranged from no acknowledgement at all to polite platitudes to profuse praise and gratitude. No amount of the last can take away the sting of even a small dose of the first. Ego is a fragile thing, especially when confidence is equally brittle.

I don’t know if people who do not create realize how much a part of the soul of the artist goes into each and every piece of work they do. But how does that translate into value, especially in the world we live in today? It’s too intangible (from the viewer or receiver’s point of view) and too precious (from the artist’s point of view) to be quantified, let alone commodified.

I’ve trod this path before, with my photography (I’m still on it, truth be told, even if I’ve achieved the stage of unconscious competence in that particular medium). It could have been a career, and a lucrative one, but I wasn’t able to put a value on it, and by giving it away, I effectively established my value as a photographer at nil. Ergo, that’s what people came to expect; there is nobody to blame for that other than myself.

I’ve reached a point over these last few months where I feel that rather than bolstering my confidence and comfort I am becoming more and more vulnerable and less and less keen to share anything I create in the face of indifference. I’m increasingly reluctant to throw things out into the void, into the informational torrent of social media. These little, precious pieces of me – and where they come from – need to be better protected and held close, away from the battering and bruising of the public eye. Build a sort of chrysalis, if you will, to allow the gestation to continue in a safe, nurturing environment, away from the light. Somewhere I can be experimental, imperfect or mediocre, and not have to worry about what other people think, or whether they even care.

I feel like I need to continue my evolution in writing, photography and art along a more personal path, and look for satisfaction and validation and value more from within and less from without.  I want to go where the path takes me, rather than where I think it should take me, or where everyone else is. I’m going to wander on my own for a while.

So yes, this is my way of saying au revoir.

*A long walk in the snow is a particularly Canadian metaphor referencing the famous walk in the snow that Justin Trudeau’s dad, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, took one winter day in Ottawa, when he decided to quit politics and leave the public eye.