Sadie Chanlett-Avery, Penland’s 5th session yoga instructor, recently posted an article to her blog about the experience of teaching yoga to artists and craftspeople:
“I lived among sweaty, grimy, & sleep-deprived folks gleefully exposed to torrents of creativity. They endure elaborate pieces crumbling after hours of work. Or worse yet, someone calling their work “cute.” Yeah, the brooding, tempestuous artists get a bad rap. Are they completely self-absorbed? Given our media climate, I witnessed much to praise and suggest otherwise.”
Yo, Sadie —
You’ve got me thinking about public relations vis a vis artists as a species. Something I haven’t thought much about lately, since most of my friends and colleagues are artists themselves, and I guess our collective crotchets comprise my vision of what’s socially normal.
My first medium was American English. It’s still my medium of choice, even though the Written Word is no longer my primary delivery system. Back in my 20′s — that’s about 40 years ago — I tried my hand at fiction. Enrolled in creative writing classes. Went to workshops and conferences. Met agents, editors, and actual published writers. Some of them were egocentric to the point of self-absorption. Some were insecure and nasty because of it. Some hoped that their Writer’s Persona would imbue their writing with greatness. (It didn’t.) But what I discovered that was worth hanging onto was that the people who knew themselves and were comfortable in that knowledge, who had mastered their medium, who made art because they couldn’t Not Make Art… Those were the people who were still curious, generous, interested, and helpful. They were the people who went out of their way to help a neophyte find her voice. They are the people I strive to emulate.
You just spent two and a half weeks among a whole bunch of people like that. Wasn’t it grand!?
Incidentally, 5th session yoga was totally worth stumbling out at the crack of dawn for.