A Simple Lifestyle is Best
Journal Entry: September 1, 2022
A simple lifestyle is typically the best, most achievable and most sustainable. Choosing a place to live that has enough room to have a studio and enough storage to keep things in order can often be affordable if you find the right neighborhood or the right part of the country. While, in the US it is nice to be in or around New York or San Francisco for example, it might not be a good choice from an affordability point of view, now-a-days, you can live almost anywhere. I have said for years, as long as there is internet service and Fedex pickup and delivery, as an artist, I can live almost anywhere.
Since art is typically highly mobile, an artists doesn’t need to live anywhere in particular, for that reason, if you can find a place that you can afford and gain an increase in square footage then that is something to consider. When we lived in Central Mexico, outside of Mexico City we sometimes heard about artists from New York moving to Mexico City because it was so much cheaper to work from there compared to New York and you still had the big city life which is important to some. Myself, I like plenty of elbow room.
Once you get to the point of having some dealers handling your work. It is possible to develop a way to work that would allow you to live virtually anywhere in the world and then ship the works back to dealers in the US who will sell them and put the money in your US bank account. Then you just live using your debit card from an ATM. We did this for years living in Central Mexico. This can add a romantic twist to your story and can provide a lot of inspiration.
Once established, an artist could be continuously on the move traveling from place to place, setting up temporary studios, work for a few weeks or months and then move along to somewhere else. As a collage artist I have experimented with creating works ‘on the fly’ working with whatever materials I find around me in any location and then bring the works home in my suitcase or ship them back to my studio. Often this kind of process can lead to new ideas and approaches and provide months or even years of new works once an artist has returned to their home studio.
In 2013 my wife, Rosalia and I spent the month of October in Paris. During the day we could wander around, go to museums and pick up papers off the street, tear posters off the walls, hunt for paper at the flea market, photograph stuff and have wine and dinner at the sidewalk cafes and in the mornings over coffee and pastry I would make collages. Then in late morning or early afternoon we would head back out into the city for the day.
As soon as I got home I made a blog for this trip called the Paris Papers
I then later published the book by the same name. You can get The Paris Papers here.
Since then I have made a number of paintings based on the collages made in Paris. I’ll show you that idea in a future post.
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