"sigh..."

As with any profession, there are going to be positives and negatives to the job. As an artist, one of the negatives is often cited as the relatively large amount of direct (and sometimes personal) rejection one can face.

The very nature of being an artist, or at least one who doesn’t create in a vacuum, is that you intend to put your work out there to be judged. That’s part of the plan for many. And the fact of the matter is, there has never been an artist whose work is universally loved. That’s not to say there aren’t artists whose work speaks to the majority, but rather, there has never been an artist whose every effort is loved by every human on the planet. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that for every person who passionately embraces your work, there is someone out there who just as passionately loathes it.

Some wilt at the first intersection of their art and rejection, forever turned from the path of showing more work. Others choose to create work solely for personal pleasure and do not want nor need the acceptance or adulation of others, while still others thrive on that very acceptance and praise. And yet, some artists seem to shed the effects of rejection like beaded raindrops on a modern raincoat – continually moving forward through a landscape bereft of external support and critical/popular praise.

Personally, I’ve found rejection easier to bear as I move forward in my career – I’ve long held the belief (both professionally and socially) that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. Truly believing that statement has helped me through some tender moments, though at the end of it all, a rock solid faith in my own work is the driving force behind my continued exploration of art as a career. I have been turned down by passers-by at festivals, I have been snidely criticized as a hobbyist by peers, fired from art related jobs, snubbed by galleries and collectors alike, rejected from group shows, and I have been rejected from grad school (I only applied to one school, one time, so I don’t want to be too dramatic there,) but the important thing is that… each… and… every… time… I went back for more. Conversely, for every critical experience I’ve endured there have been just as many positive, and I (an eternal optimist by genetic predisposition) place far greater stock in the power of the positive than I do in the negative. Specifically I’ve found it helpful to have multiple submissions/projects/targets/etc. lined up, so that when one is out the door, I am already refocusing on the next, constantly looking to move forward rather than dwelling on the “what if” of the last effort.

When confronted by rejection I’ve found the array of emotions that can manifest to be, at times, bewildering. There’s anger, disbelief, sadness, anxiety and occasionally the odd-ball sensation of relief or ambivalence. It’s that last one I fear the most – as I’ve been told it is often worse to be ignored than it is to be loved or hated, and the feeling of ambivalence that can arise post-rejection is akin to ignoring the opportunity for growth that rejection can bring to the artist. I try to embrace the criticism from a coldly rational place, attempting to look closely at the comments made or the reasoning behind the rejection in order to determine if there’s merit there. If there is, I see if I can incorporate that into my workflow or work where appropriate. If I find no merit, I’m sure to double check and speak with others about it so as to make sure I’m not being dismissive from a place of backlash emotion or misplaced perspective. Needless to say, it doesn’t always work, and sometimes my feelings are hurt. However, once I’ve recovered I try to remind myself that rejection is simply another form of criticism – one that when properly wielded can result in unrivaled opportunities for growth. After all, don’t most artists jump at the opportunity to be a part of professional critique panels and the like?

Having a support network of friends, or fellow artists to help digest and make sense of the inevitable rejection is priceless for many. Some like to wallow in the feelings that rejection brings – inspiring them to create from a dark place. Many take solace in the fact that rejection is often a shared burden: an experience nearly all artists can sympathize with. In the end, however, there is no right way to handle rejection – save for not letting it destroy your ambition or dreams. To say anything else as though it were fact would actually just be an expression of opinion. And as we know, everyone has an opinion… which can sometimes manifest as a rejection of your work.

For an artist, finding your way to a new body of work can often be a lot like finding love: when least expected or sought – there it is!

Such is the case with my newest emerging project, “…and with blind faith do we charge into the promise of tomorrow.”

As this is a sneak peek I don’t want to give too much away (the dust is still settling) but suffice it to say that this seemingly simple body of line drawings deals with sight, trust, representation and the incredibly complex relationship we are creating with our machines.

How were the drawings made? What do the books mean (see image below)? What’s with the talk about “our machines”?

All will soon be revealed; eyes peeled: the complete project is to be released in the next month or so.

installation as imagined in a gallery setting

a sci-fi commission comes to life

Welcome to the first installment of “Essential Artists”: a new recurring feature on Clogvert. It’s a celebration of the arts, and a rare chance for one artist to assume the role of fan.

Now, I’ve found that artists for the most part do not help one another – this is not due to a pervasive and sinister sense of selfishness, but rather, the acts of creating and simply promoting yourself take so much time and energy that there’s bound to be little left in the tank to help your fellow artist. In my own small way, with this column I’d like to change that and celebrate the artists whose work I’m drawn to, no matter the medium or subject.

I stumbled upon the work of Bodie Chewning while grabbing a quick cup of java at the SoHo, New York bastion of heart palpitations known as Gimme! Coffee. Honestly, and as cavalier as it may sound, I don’t often take too great a notice of the work hung on the walls of coffee shops – but obviously, this time was different.

I’ve long been a fan of science fiction and comic books (in fact, they’re the reason I became an artist): Bodie’s work, as I’d come to learn, often speaks to both genres in style and subject.

So arresting was the quality of line and general sense of fantastic imagination that I tracked the artist down and commissioned a personal work (shown above – click image or here to enlarge).

Chewning, who is self taught, also produces t-shirt graphics, accessory illustrations and designs for both major & minor apparel companies in New York City.

To see other examples of his work and to find out more head on over to his website (www.bodiechewning.com).

I’ve long recognized the fact that there are those who are amazing painters, others who are truly gifted sculptors, or still others who are near savants with a camera. I’ve also come to recognize the fact that that’s not me.

As you may or may not know, depending on how you’ve come to read these line, I tend to dabble in a variety of mediums. I’ve heard it all, “jack of all trades, master of none,” but it’s the way my mind works, and it’s what keeps me interested. It’s also what ultimately led me to understand where my true talent lies. I’m good at being creative. Compulsively so.

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines creativity through it’s root – to create, which is in turn defined as “to produce through imaginative skill.” That, in a nutshell, is what I love to do. I love the conceptualizing: the genesis, the flights of distant fancy that swirl in my head as I sit in a chair and stair into space, or as I lay in the dark and drift off to sleep. It brings a smile to my face to even write about it, so it’s not surprising for me to say that creating things is what I believe I was born to do. I would be a bad accountant, a bad factory worker, a bad fighter pilot, a bad CEO, and the list goes on. But I’m also not foolish, and realize that “creating things” allows me an awful lot of freedom. It allows me to find satisfaction within the realms of design, drawing, painting, photography, writing, sculpture and to a lesser degree, music. In fact, so all encompassing is this passion to create, were it not for the grounding anchor of my home life and a woman who is not an artist, I would lead the life of a vampire: gradually working longer hours, sleeping later and later each day until the hours of sunlight I see would be outweighed by the hours of waking darkness. I know this, because I’ve lead that life. It’s a pretty lonely place and I’m thankful to be (sometimes begrudgingly) pulled back into the stream of humanity.

Again and again I come back to the question of what it is that drives a person to do what they do. As I lay on the concrete floor of my studio working on yet another Carnivora drawing (the most ambitious by several feet) I can’t help but wonder why it is I’m compelled to work on a drawing for a body of work that has been released. I thought I was done with it. I really did, and yet… here I am, working on yet another drawing which is certain to take me hundreds of hours to complete, and is guaranteed to cause my barely managed repetitive stress injury to flare up. Perhaps it’s the sense of calm and focus that comes over me while laying on that cold, hard floor. Perhaps it’s the feeling of satisfaction I get when I sit back and look at the lines. Or perhaps it’s that small sense of wonder that comes from knowing that this sheet of paper was once blank. That the lines that form a cohesive image are something that I’ve created. That came from my hand. My mind.

It’s enough to keep you up at night…

Paul And Her Money, digital C-print, 20x30

Knowing WHAT you want, and WHERE you want to go, from a career standpoint, is arguably more valuable than sheer talent.

As one traverses the road of life, moving forward (and occasionally back), you will find that there is no lack of opinion as to what you should or should not be doing with your time. And from an art world standpoint, there are few topics more incendiary than selling your work. More accurately, however, that should read “than HOW to sell your work.” There are those that argue (and I have literally heard all of these arguments uttered aloud) a “true” artist should only sell their work through an established gallery: to do otherwise demeans the work. There are those that argue that selling your work through a gallery belittles the artistic process, damaging your integrity as an artist. There are then those that argue that in the face of modern technology and social media any artist who does not use the tools at his or her disposal is not serious about art as a career. And of course, there are those that argue one must make a living any way they can and thus their artwork should be sold in any venue that will accept it, market it, and push it out unto the masses. Obviously, there are variations on every theme and more often than not people fall between the lines of these schools of thought, though a decent filter can be found by determining whether someone has attended graduate school for visual arts: they tend to think along party lines.

I fault no one for their beliefs – if it works for you, great! I envy those who have the support of a successful gallery, and those whose artistic endeavors are buoyed by their staunch sense of artistic integrity, and I see the wisdom in using the tools at hand to forge ahead, and I respect the security of a good living earned from seeing your art spread far and wide in shops around the country. But most of all I applaud the surety of knowing which way you’re going, for it is a rare bird indeed who travels on a path without wavering.

I believe in balance. I believe that there exists a space in which all elements can be combined successfully allowing the artist their freedom of creativity, their sense of integrity, and a feeling of security through continued sales via multiple outlets. Have I found it? No, but I will keep looking. I will keep pushing. I will because I believe in it. And once I find it… oh boy, watch out.

The Online Store at www.jasoncovert.com

I am pleased to announce the arrival of a new online store located at www.jasoncovert.com.

Be amongst the first to explore this new aspect of our online presence – the shop at jasoncovert.com is now open for business: featuring limited edition prints, micro-edition chapbooks, art cards, books, CDs and t-shirts. There’s a little something for everyone, from the well-versed collector to the casual viewer.

For the inaugural run of our new effort, prints from the new series, crash_, will be shipped free of charge.

Come and get some…

I’m going to get this out of the way before I even get to the meat of the tale, so sick have I become of hearing others say, “you shoulda’…”. I had back-ups.

I had a system of multiple drives, both internal and external, and back-ups spread across them in hopes of mitigating any disaster that may befall. In the end, however, it didn’t really help.

As you may have surmised, my computer crashed. Of course, computers crash daily, mostly to no real ill effect for their users. But… and there’s always a but, this time was different. I’ll spare you the techy details and make note of the fact that I am a tech savvy individual, and my initial efforts to salvage my files looked dim.

In those first days I encountered something… unexpected: I was struck first by how abstract the idea of digital data, for though you see it on your screen as a physical presence, it is, in fact, a jumble of 1′s and 0′s, easily erased in a flash.

We put so much faith in its durability and yet at the end of the day, like Russian Matryoshka dolls, our precious information nests deep inside of the mirrored surfaces of a fragile platter, nested within a tiny metal box nested inside of yet another larger metal box tasked with the safe keeping of our memories and, in my case, the majority of my professional efforts.

And with that realization I had been brought to the next wave of crushing thought: laboring beneath the belief that I had lost all of my work, my photography, my design, projects and archives… I started to feel as though I wasn’t real – as though Jason Covert, the individual, the artist, instantly did not matter as much anymore. I was frightened, not so much about the work being lost, but about my being lost. I was aghast at this realization for it clued me in to exactly how much of my self-worth and sense-of-self is wrapped up in the images and work I create. I have always envisioned myself as a person of strength who’s character was attached not to what I did, but to who I was. Now, I wasn’t so sure that was the truth. I felt somehow weakened, both by the loss of data and by that realization of self: that I am what I do. That what I do is what I am.

Like any truly eye-opening moment of self-insight I am slowly coming to terms with it. To deny it would be a disservice of the greatest order, and yet, having your view of yourself altered almost instantaneously is never an easy pill to swallow.

…because everyone loves a story with an ending: happily, I was able to recover approximately 60% of my files, though the recovery process stripped all files of their names, resulting in a collection of almost 75,000 files that will need to be sorted by hand. I am pleased to have the information back, but… 75,000!?!… that’s a lot of eyeball hours. Sigh… maybe I shoulda’…

It starts with the tickle of an idea in the back of your head: one that you don’t give too much thought to, but rather that comes to you in your quiet moments – right before you fall asleep, or when you’re riding the subway and watching the stylishly dressed older woman pick her nose behind her YSL oversized glasses.

Very infrequently is it a single idea, but rather they come in waves and it’s your job as the artist to pick and choose or decipher the merit of the various options. As Mr Brown, my high school chemistry teacher noted, focusing becomes the next important step in the process of distilling the projects down to a manageable number. If an individual is purely artistically minded then they might select the one that tickles their art bone the most, but if someone is focused equally on the business end of things, they might weigh the projects against the current trends in contemporary arts, or the likelihood of it being “well received” by the arts community. Personally, I don’t think there’s only one way to go about these things, though of one thing I am certain, as Emerson wrote on the subject of self-reliance, “you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.” If you ask for advice, make sure to hear it all – there’s an awful lot of it out there. Trust yourself, for though you may not always be right, you will be able to always blame only one person: yourself.

Currently I’ve got what I feel are four very strong concepts kicking around the ol’ brain pan, and two others perhaps too ambitious to be put into motion now.

It was recently suggested to me that I lay the ideas out before me and walk away for a day: more often than not, upon returning, one will see a common thread that runs throughout them all. It is then the artist’s job to pull that thread until they come together as a tightly knit whole. Or not. In which case it’s back to the proverbial drawing board.

I’ll leave you with a taste from a considered project.

The Scene: the re-discovery of a long-dead relative’s suitcase containing a cache of 100 year old glass negatives.

The Question: can the dead speak through the living?

strange bedfellows

That’s how long its been since last I posted to this online reserve for words and images.

5 months is a long time for me to not write anything down.

At first I felt as though I desperately needed to be writing, which quickly turned into a worry that I wasn’t writing, and finally, over the course of 5 excruciating months, I realized that I had needed to not be writing. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, meaning in this case that all becomes clearer the farther you move away from it.

As the dust settles on the frenzy that was my first solo show, Carnivora, I’ve made peace with the inevitable adrenaline depleted lull that results from running the human engine at so high a level for so long. Coupled with the withering winter weather that settled upon us through November and on into the new year I think it accurate to say that I retreated into a safe space within myself. It was a space where I could slowly attempt to understand everything that had happened over the course of the last two and half years and begin to glean what lessons there were to be had from the experience.

Its taken me nearly all of this time to be able to say it aloud, but Carnivora was a success. In many ways it exceeded my expectations and yet in still other ways it failed to meet my admittedly lofty hopes. That’s as real world as it gets.

Carnivora succeeded via the generous amount of media attention heaped upon it and yet, like so many other artistic endeavors of the day, struggled beneath the burden of our faltering economy.  The turn-out was beyond my wildest hopes, with over 300 people in attendance on a night whose weather veered towards the biblical (2, not 1, tornados descended upon the major metropolitan area that night.) After the fact, at the start of 2011, F.A.M.E. NYC, an arts and entertainment focused blog, went so far as to declare Carnivora the “Top Art Exhibit of 2010” – lofty praise indeed.

the turn-out was beyond my wildest hopes...

And yet, I felt deflated upon its closing: very nearly tearing up the last time I turned out the lights and walked away from the space.

You see, it took me 3 months to realize that it wasn’t about the sales or the galleries, or even the flattering media praise heaped upon the exhibition. It took me another 2 months to realize I wasn’t just telling myself that. In the end, I realized it was about doing it. Actually making it happen. Conceptualizing the idea behind the project, creating the work, convincing others that it was worthy of being shown to the world, and then showing the work! Truly it was about the journey and not the destination, which ironically, was something I told myself throughout the project, but managed to forget at day’s end.

And then… I realized it was time to do it all over again! That’s when I started rubbing my hands together and muttering “what next, what next?” with a wicked gleam in my eye.

I’ve planted many seeds since then and I’m eager to see which sprouts first.

I would gather the funds and backing necessary, produce a massive amount of art, which when completed would be shown on its own in a gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea art district. I would not pay for the space, but I would instead convince others that the work deserved to be seen. I would use this exhibition as a springboard for my career in the arts: I told them that I referred to it as a Career Launch Event.

I was honestly and earnestly told that, “generally speaking, that doesn’t happen for unknown artists.”

Well, sometimes it does…

I have a solo show at a gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea art district… and I feel pretty goddamn good about it.

Of course, as many of us know, it’s easy to dream, but bringing that dream to fruition can be a painstaking process. The realization that dreams, generally speaking, do not just simply come true is a tough pill to swallow for many. Those dreams must be methodically broken down into smaller components, which must then be broken down into a digestible series of actionable steps… or, in keeping with the cliché: baby steps. The hard part is not figuring out where you want to be, but rather, figuring out how exactly you’re going to get there.

As I ramp up for the show, set to open Thursday, September 16th, above all else I know… I’m tired – but I am more alive than I have ever been and I know that I have a chance in front of me that I will not squander.

I hope you can make it: it should be an interesting experience!