Dear Artist,

A subscriber wrote, “I know by experience that art-making is a conduit to something higher than workaday life — but I’m finding it harder and harder to overcome depression about the low status of my day job and the low status of visual artists. It’s not just that painters are viewed with some contempt; increasingly, our work just isn’t viewed at all. Look at the entertainment section of any newspaper. It will have articles on just about every other art form but painting. It seems that painting is terminally ill or dead. At age 42, I have the typical dream of wanting to build a full-time career as a painter, but I’m increasingly pessimistic about that ever happening. The work may be meaningful, but it seems you need a monk’s or nun’s vow of poverty and hardship to engage in it.”

As is my habit, I put down my brush and wrote back: “There’s a possibility that you may be using too many of the wrong words: “Poverty, hardship, pessimistic, workaday, depression, low status, contempt, ill, dead.”

Then, within a minute, this letter came in from another subscriber: “Before Martin Seligman et al there was Victor Frankl, a German psychiatrist who spent most of WWII in an internment camp. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he wrote that everything was taken from him except his power to change the way he felt. In such terrible circumstances he realized that the simple act of changing his vocabulary — the words he used in thinking — was… For the rest of the letter click here

I think you will enjoy the information and ideas shared in Sara & Robert’s letters as I have.

Yours in Creative Photography,     Bob