Quote from Christopher Benson Slayer of Windmills (Substack)

I visited an old friend recently who plays Irish folk music. He’s done it professionally from time to time, but his main career — at which he also excels — is in an entirely different and unrelated discipline. The music is something he seems to do for his own pleasure and satisfaction. I play that kind of music too, though not nearly as well as he does, but well enough to sit with him from time to time and swap some tunes and riffs. On this recent visit he said something about this genre we both love which goes right to the heart of this question of what art is and where it lives. Irish music is quirky, technically-challenging stuff that is clearly not for everybody. Some folks love to listen to it and others just can’t stand it. What my friend said that struck me so is that however you might feel about it from the outside as a listener, you kind-of have to “play it yourself to truly get what is so wonderful about it”, because the wonder is really in the playing, and playing alongside somebody who does it better than you do, so long as they have a generous spirit, is one of the most nourishing creative experiences we can have. 

I can only speak for myself, but I do know that my reasons for becoming a painter are very much like those of almost every other of my artistic peers with whom I am friends and who I most admire. The goal was always to figure out how to make things as well, effectively and originally as those artists who move me most. I didn’t become a painter because I wanted to be as famous as Vermeer or Van Gogh or Turner — all of whom inspired me when I began painting as a teenager — but because I wanted to be able to make works that would be as intrinsically good as theirs and powerful enough to move somebody else in the same way. That is still what I want, now fifty years later.

The joy, as well as all the struggles, hurdles and disappointments of being an artist of any kind all reside in the lifelong project of learning, through careful study, what makes other people’s work great, and of discovering the path, through much trial and error, that might one day lead our own work to that goal. None of that has anything to do with becoming famous or rich, however much those rewards might result from the effort. Furthermore, any art made solely for those purposes will last no longer than the cycle that brought it acclaim. It is only the other kind that lives long, and that stuff often achieves no fame in its own time. windmillslayer@substack.com