June 2009

I know. This is rather a cheesy title, isn’t it
But the lessons I learned are so defining for my development as an artist that I can’t continue this blog without sharing it with you. So here it goes.

An immigrant’s son starts a business. Kind of a fish and chips shop (although in the Netherlands we don’t eat fish with our chips).
This is very special. Most immigrant’s son (and daughters) are unemployed. Some are getting their degrees.
A few (male) immigrants have their own tailor shop. But I know of only 3 or 4 entrepreneurial immigrant’s sons.

Although his shop is down the road from where I live I hardly ever go there. I don’t eat as much chips as I used to. When I go there it’s usually on odd hours and I’m the only customer. Which is nice because it gives me the change to talk a little with him.
He’s clearly very proud of his business and rightly so.

Last Thursday I didn’t feel like cooking and I went down to his shop to buy me some chips and fried meat. He was serving a few customers so I had to wait for a while. Which gave me the opportunity to watch him work.

I noticed a few strange things.
First I saw him watering his satay sauce down. I must say that I never seen anybody do that.
At first I thought he did it because the sauce had gotten too dry but soon I found that he was running out of sauce. Which is very bad timing on his part. But he commented that it’s something that could happen to anybody.
Then I noticed him running through his shop to get some meat out of the fridge.
When it finally was my turn I realized that he had taken as much time to serve three customers as most (fish and) chips sellers need to serve a dozen customers.

So while I was waiting for my bag of chips I wondered why there was such a gap between his and mine impression of his business. But it wasn’t until I started thinking about how I could explain it to him that I realized the problem.

Because he’s an immigrant’s son it’s not PC to comment on his business. He could think that you were actually commenting on the color of his skin.
So nobody ever does.
And if nobody ever comments on the way you do your business you must be doing a very good job.

So there it is. The story about one thing I learned while waiting for chips.

If you’ve ever read any advise on how you should go about writing a blog you’ll know that titles are very important.
If you want to become popular you should at least publish a few stories about things you’ve learned and the more cheesy the title the better.

But I don’t want to become popular. Or actually I do, but not in that way.
So I was planning to file this story away as something funny I couldn’t use in my blog. But the story kept bugging me.
This morning I realized why.

I’m in the same boat as this immigrant’s son. Apart from a few trolling art teachers (who are willing to give me a thousand boring exercises if I only turn control of this weblog over to them), I get hardly any criticism.
People tell me that I’m talented and how much they like me telling about my life. But as nice as it is to get compliments you don’t learn anything from them. You learn from criticism.
Which means that I’ll have to criticize myself.

Thinking about this, and some other problems I’ve run into, I realized that this will impact the way I write my blog.
I never aspired to be a day painter because I think that day painters let the need to publish daily trump the quality of their work. But this will probably mean that I post even less then I’ve done up till now.

The decision to criticize myself defines me as an artist: I’m not a blogger who draws but a drawing artist who blogs.
This means that I’m going to break every rule out of the blogging rule book.

In this blog I’m writing an account of my journey to become a better artist.
I’ll do that the way that feels best to me. I won’t be posting regularly. Sometimes I might be gone for a few days (or even weeks) if that is what I need.
You’re welcome to join my journey (rss feed).
But it is my journey!
No compromises.

I know. This is rather a cheesy title, isn’t it But the lessons I learned are so defining for my development as an artist that I can’t continue this blog...

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