State of the Artist - February 2018

No doubt some of you have been wondering at my erratic posting and generally lower production of the last few months. I’m going through some of the biggest changes in my life, and it’s interfering with my ability to make art something fierce. In short, my family has been further diminished in a way that has involved lots of toxic and distracting drama and financial stress, and I’m moving farther away than I have heretofore ever done, and am still currently engaged in packing. This had drastically reduced my ability to produce artwork lately, and yet I continue to need to make money with my art. More details below the cut (it’s a long read; You Have Been Warned.)

TL:DR; I have to pack but I need money to move me and my cat down south.

PATRON SPECIFIC ADDENDUM: I'm going to be doing my best to catch up on my stack of reward IOUs ASAP but I'm going to have to ask you to carry on waiting for your art for another month, as the actual likelihood of me getting much done before I move to Tucson is, sadly, rather small.  Getting current with all of you is one of my highest priorities and I would like to do so as swiftly as I can manage. 

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Where to begin? The last few months, especially, have been insanely busy, but I need to go back a bit farther, to last summer, to set the stage a bit more. First I must establish the nature of my current family; for the greater part of the last 17 years our household has consisted of I, my mother, and my stepfather, henceforth referred to as Mr. F. They met just before I finished my first four years of college, and our household has consisted, at various times, of all the various combinations of the three since then. We’ve had long term plans for some time now, which included moving to Tucson, AZ, when we could manage to. (It was a firm enough decision that we have been toasting to a future home in Tuscon over every single evening meal since last spring.)

I’ve had much support in my art endeavours over the years, and in 2016 I managed to start doing art on a regular basis for the first time in a decade. Last year I managed to revive my art business after an equally long hiatus (a long story for another time, mostly about death and failure). Growth was faster than I anticipated but still modest; I was able to keep a small amount of pocket money but the vast majority of my income went straight into the household. Fair enough! for I had been supported for quite a while, and I was quite content with turning over 90% of my earnings for the nonce, on the expectation that as things eased I might retain a bit more for myself. By June money was tight, for mid-year an intolerable work situation led to my mother leaving her job, and Mr. F had stretched his very extensive retirement too far through a series of quite frankly idiotic purchases. The man brings home more in four or five months in retirement than I have made in the best working year with a ‘real job’ in my life (5k net! a month! in retirement!), but somehow exceeded his means to the point that I, the artist who just relaunched their business and was at about one quarter to half poverty level at best, was the one now literally keeping food on the table. Still, my art was going well, so I wasn’t too deeply concerned, and I began to do commissions in addition to the patreon work in the hopes of having some money of my own again. Things were stressful, but I was pretty upbeat, if getting tired from the level of artwork. I was having to do 8-12 hours every day to get all the things done I wanted to, and it was taking its toll. I was tired, and I needed a proper vacation, but money was too tight to take a break.

Then the Western US caught on fire.

For about 6 weeks straight, we were shrouded in smoke and never saw the sun. It was depressing as fuck and my energy levels dipped further. It was even more stressful on my mother, who has asthma and was therefore almost totally housebound in those kind of conditions; there were many days where visiblity was down to 1000 metres due to the choking smoke. My art output dropped even further and I was in danger of falling behind on everything. The smoke eventually cleared, but I was even more exhausted yet had little opportunity for a proper break, for money continued to be tight. My mother, who is just past 60, was having no luck in finding work, and Mr. F continued to do shit-all about fixing his financial overextension. He also began to slip clandestinely into the bottle again, to our fury.

Then the Pendleton Round-Up happened in late September, a yearly event that I really detest and arguably the second biggest rodeo on the yearly circuit, behind the Calgary Stampede. People come from literally around the world to see it, and the disease vectors are commensurate with that and the huge amount of critters that come in, which always creates a very special ‘Crud’ each year. Our family used to set up a tent in the ‘Indian Village’ next to the arena grounds, but a little while after my grandmother’s death in 2013 we stopped doing so, and we’d come to dislike it long before that. Rodeo ain’t our thang, nor are cowboys (despite my late grandmother marrying one). We avoided it like the plague, but Mr. F not only went there but got falling-down drunk and, as we would soon find, brought home the annual Round-Up Crud. He literally fell down the stairs, he was so fucking drunk. Both my mother and I were in the kitchen at the moment, and we wouldn’t have shed many tears if he had broken his fool neck; I was certainly hoping for it at that point. He escaped serious injury somehow.

However, we did not escape the illness he brought home, and it laid me low for effectively a month and set me behind on all of my commissions and Patreon obligations, a state I’m only climbing out of now (not there yet, but soon!). Mr. F began to relapse into his alchoholism, and tensions began to rise. Despite everything, I kept my art income on the rise with each month, yet somehow I was left with basically nothing, not even a tithe for myself. I began to resent having to cover shortfalls in the budget produced by someone with straight up FIVE TIMES my income in retirement alone, and was becoming more than a little peeved. My mother needed some time and moved out to my late grandmother’s ranch, which we’ve been taking care of since her passing (80 acres covered by decades of negect, a saga that I’m not even going to touch right now, even though it is important to the overall context - - those of you who have dealt with estates and wills and inheritance and all that may have some idea of the strain that can cause a family.) I was also absolutely livid by the fact that I had been made ill by an asshole who insisted on going to something that we had made very clear that we hated and wanted nothing to do with. We had planned carefully to totally avoid going out during Round-Up week specifically to avoid getting sick, after all.

Things took an odd turn briefly at the end of October, when Mr. F ‘tripped’ (i.e. fell over drunk) and somehow avoided being dead or breaking anything whilst managing to thouroughly smash his face into most likely a brick fireplace hearth, and concuss himself. We assumed he was just really drunk again (he had been) since he was hiding out for a couple days but it actually knocked some sense into him, and for a while the person that we used to know and love before years of occasional hard bouts of drinking and separations and coming back togethers took their toll. Mom moved back into this house in town from grandmother’s ranch on the res, and we were still toasting ‘to our future home in Tucson’ every night; things seemed to be back on track, if slowly and carefully. It felt like our little broken but good family had a chance again.

Sadly, that person started to slip away again. I was finding it harder and harder to work, and continued to have to plug shortfalls in the family finances. I couldn’t manage even 8 hours of production a day, and many days it was basically zero. I’d been a month behind on everything since being ill, and just kept getting further and further behind. The illusion of normalcy was kept for a while, though.

Then came the last day of November. I remember I was working in my office, trying to finish something. A deal to have a friend of Mr. F’s be a caretaker for grandmother’s house had fallen through (one can’t leave a house empty out here during the winter; risk of pipes freezing and rodents moving in just start the list of concerns) and Mr. F was going to move out there for a little while to tend to it. Somehow a simple discussion escalated into Mr. F, in a most ungentlemanly fashion as he snarled off down the stairs after insulting my mother in various ways, tossing over his shoulder ‘I want a divorce’ and ‘you should have seen this coming’ and so forth, before running off to the house of his late mother-in-law. In effect, stepping out whilst I was the only one actively employed, at well-below-poverty levels of earnings, and ditching us.

Even though the language is hyperbolic, we tend to refer to it as ‘the nuclear bomb’ as it was basically an emotional equivalent of such a thing. Keep in mind that despite all the tensions and difficulties, which span 16 years and not the mere 6-7 months of my narrative here, we three when living in the same household, had continued to eat whenever possible each night as a family, and toasted ‘to our future home in Tucson’ ever since the decision had been COLLECTIVELY made back in the spring. Both my mother and I were fairly well shattered emotionally for a space; more than anything I was already exhausted and dealing with being suddenly the only one with something of an income in the house was a little bit more than I could take. I’ve been hitting my limit for a while now, and in the past week have had both the worst panic attack of my life (literally thought I was dying at one point) and had several emotional breakdowns. Making art of any quality has been extremely difficult in these conditions.

Fortunately many people have been helping me out both financially and emotionally in this time of great difficulty, for which I shall be ever grateful. December was bleak and hard, and making art has been difficult. Things have been starting to turn around, though. My mother applied for and got a job down in Tucson, which starts quite soon indeed, so we’re in the process of packing to move. I’ll be out of here before the end of the month and on my way south with the cat.

I do need to raise some funds to cover the costs of flying myself and the cat, as well as some upcoming convention expenses (more on that soon!) and will be opening some commissions soon. More information on that forthcoming.

Anyway! If you’re still reading after all that semi-coherent narrative, hopefully you can understand why so many projects stand unfinished, why the dailies have been anything but, and why I’m rather behind in my artistic obligations in general. The good thing is that soon things will be settling down and I will be in a new residence, far away from the drama that has been an incessant irritation and has compromised my artistic productivity quite badly.

I want to thank again everyone who has been supporting me through this time of great turbulence in my life. Trust me when I say I’ve only given you the merest sketch of events and have left most details out.

I’ll be erratic in posting things until I move out at the end of February, at which point I’ll be offline until a week or so into March. I’ll be getting my office up and running as soon as possible, as I’ve got a lot of artistic obligations to tend to.

Cheers and thanks for all your support,

AZ / Amar