Oh, but you ARE a real artist!

why won’t you believe it?

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nesting

i.

There are two cabins, one blue, one yellow. In the first photo, the surrounding forest is green, lush, glowing. In the second, it sleeps, softly padded by snow. I stop scrolling to stare. Fall Into Focus. An artist residency. Applications open. I click through to the website and spend the next twenty minutes perusing its pages. Private rooms. Studio spaces. A lake reflecting an everchanging sky. A meditation room and a traditional Finnish sauna. Improved focus…no outcome pressures. Eventually, I bookmark the tab and slot it into the maybe one day shelf of my brain. 

But I pull it down from said shelf obsessively; mindlessly meandering through the website’s pages. The next time Arteles’ Fall Into Focus program is advertised in my local writing newsletter, I take it as a sign. The contemplation feels rebellious. I’ve always considered residencies obscure, elusive things, cloaked in prestige and exclusivity—opportunities for the more experienced, widely published writers. For the Big(ger) Names and the well-connected. For those further ahead in their careers than I am.

I stare at the application for longer than I’d like to admit.

What do I have to lose?

ii.

What does it mean to be a serious artist, a real artist?

Who’s to know but you? Forget the milieu of discerning voices ready to crucify your efforts. Forget expectations of awards and publication, full-time creative work and paycheck to show for it. You’re real enough and you know it. It just feels oddly arrogant to say so.

Anyone pursuing the arts knows how humbling an endeavour it is. You reach into the belly of your vulnerability and present what you find slant on a platter, ready for others to feast upon. Though, when it comes down to the creative act—and to the space between oneself and that place where naivety and vulnerability and every single wild dream and crippling fear comes alive—what anyone else dares to think or say bears no weight. That right there is impenetrable. Intimate. It is a world within worlds and for a moment, I am the only human thing to exist within it. I am architect and vestibule, entwined in an act of faith. I am, for a moment, holy. Or at least as close to holy as I will ever be. Until that creative pleasure/pain/process/product enters the realm of public opinion, it really is something sacred.

And others do see that—truly, they do. They see the wonder in art, find the awe in poetry. But scrutiny goes hand in hand with reverie and it’s foolish to think oneself above the former. It’s all about serious artists in this world and I’ll be damned if I let a discriminating chorus of criticism crush me any longer. I don’t want to be taken seriously because frankly, I don’t want to be taken at all. I want to be seen, felt, understood. But never taken.

You are a real artist if you say you are.

I, for one, am a writer. A poetess. And I dare you to say otherwise.

iii.

Self-belief is an act of faith and please listen to me when I say you must have faith in yourself to be an artist. Because the truth is this: if you do not have faith in yourself and your art, no one else can place their faith in you.

Applying to Fall Into Focus was an act of faith—and a wild one at that—and yet:

I am here.

And when I landed, there was snow. The air shocked my lungs with its honesty, its coolness, and the birches and pines softened to a sweeping white-green. They call my home from the month Nexus and it’s blue and was once and school and I can’t help thinking that nexus sounds like nest so I am nesting like a Russian doll within the soft eggshell skins of myself and learning to let go. I am letting go. Everyone is kind. And we are both the art and the artists. And oh—oh, do we have faith!

Nexus, Arteles Creative Center

With love from Hämeenkyrö, Finland,

Caitlin xx

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