Producing art

The first piece in my COVID-19: end date unknown series.

There’s doodling. There’s making art. And then there is producing art. I have sometimes doodled nonsense on a piece of paper and often made art in the form of collages, but in the past year I have discovered the satisfaction and joy of producing art. 

Last year I wrote about digital archives that were gathering ordinary people's diaries of their experience during what, back then, was still the oddity of a COVID lockdown. I had been making collages as a way to channel my wide-ranging emotions into something productive and creative. I enjoyed the process and, as is my want, dated each one, but it wasn’t until well into the process that it dawned on me that I could (should) submit them to one of those public archives. Why not? 

And so I did, finally, on June 20th last year, upload a file that included a cover, an introduction, pictures of the collages, and explanatory text for each one. That act transformed my ‘making’ of art into my ‘producing’ of art. The difference, in my mind, is two fold. 

One, I was taking something that I had started as a lark and a mere occupation of my time and I was confirming it as a creative documentary of my experience, worthy of being titled and of being seen within a larger context. And two, I was taking something I had created at the privacy of my collage table in our basement and I was putting it out into the public — indeed, into a digital archive curated by historians from universities around the world.

And that transformed my sense of self as an artist. While no trumpets sounded and no acclaimed academic clamoured for series No. 2, I saw — quite literally in my own hands — something that I was prepared to say was worth sharing beyond my inner circle of always-complimentary friends and family. Producing art, for me, means presenting the work as my own, in my own name and putting it out into the world expressly because I want strangers to see it. 

As a professional communicator, I have prepared hundreds of pieces of writing as a corporate employee. But when I put out a piece of art — a collage, say, or maybe a blog — in my own name, of my own volition, then, from my perspective and in my experience, it takes up a different kind of space in the larger world. That space is bolder for how I fill it and bigger for how I relate to it — more as though I were taking myself seriously as the artist or the writer. 

And there you have it: From maker to producer. 

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A Post a Day in May No. 6: For the past two years, I have posted something to this blog every single day in May. This year, I hope to do it again.