Airbrush or scar tissue?

Yesterday I had a very honest conversation with an international art dealer.

She’s someone I respect both professionally and whom I like personally. We’ve known each other for over a decade, she is intelligent, witty, driven, hard working, incredibly well connected and extremely savvy. She has sold hundreds of millions of dollars of art around the world in the last few years. She’s on the rise, she’s on the pulse, she’s informed and she influences others… but yesterday she unequivocally missed the point of who I am as a human, and what I’m trying to achieve as an artist.

She said something so profound to me, and she got me utterly, entirely wrong.

Her words were so jarring that the conversation polarised and galvanised my thinking about my own journey even more solidly.

She paused mid conversation and said:

“Mark if you want to really get to the next level as an artist, if you want your works to be collected by even more important collectors, you need to remove all the early crap, and the iconic portrait works that you made in your 20’s, get them all off Google and other websites. Mark, just get rid of them. They are embarrassing. You need to spend a lot of money and invest in your future by cleaning up your past.”

I followed her line of thinking. It seemed so ‘right’. I even considered who I’d pay to do this for me. I Googled myself and looked back at some of the early works from 15 years ago, the failed prototypes, my own lack of experience, and the pieces I made under duress, desperate for the paycheck. I found my mind plummeting, my heart sinking into a black hole of despair…

“I’ll never get to where I want to get to unless I can fix and erase my past”

And then I suddenly snapped out of the spell and I woke up!

I smiled and went about my day with a fierce resolve to NEVER airbrush my scars or hide the truth of my own story.

We all have a past.
We all have a story.
We all have scar tissue.
No one arrived clean into this world, we were all born in a wet mess of blood and amniotic fluid.
We all fell when we first tried to walk.
We all have stories of heartbreak, of failure and defeat.

The point is not to pretend it didn’t happen.
The point is not to stay there.

The point is to own it, to get up and go again.
We evolve, we learn, we refine our processes and our thinking by failing.

Failing upwards.

I realised if I were to airbrush out my own past, and edit the truth out of my own story to fit into how an elite circle needed to perceive me, I’d have to become a fake, inauthentic version of myself in the future. And I imagined weeks, months, years from now, I might be sat at the table of the elite art curators and collectors, or at a chic New York party, terrified that they might find out the truth, nervous that I was only invited there today because they were ignorant of an airbrushed version of my yesterday.

I would be living behind the flimsy constraints of a plastic mask, hiding who I really was.

Terrified that my mask might slip.

Sorry if I offend you reader… but fuck that!

I’m serious… I refuse to live like that!

There’s nothing worse than being trapped in a system of shame, regret and hiding from who we really are, because those people we are so desperate to impress might not like the truth of our scarred authenticity coming into the light.

After my conversation with her I decided I’m never going to airbrush out my past. I’ll never allow myself to live inside the prison of the opinions of others.

If I allow an airbrushed opinion to promote me, then I would fear the truth coming out could demote me.

If you give someone the power to validate you, you also give them the power to invalidate you.

To live in that kind of terror or have that kind of thinking would make me a slave.

That’s the murky world of politicians and CEO’s, it’s not the realm of artists.

Or at least it shouldn’t be.

Artists must tell the truth. Even if it hurts to do so.

We don’t trust politics, we don’t trust organised religion.

But if the artists and truth tellers also fall to the very same allure of temptation and reward, and bend who they are to get ahead… then truth is sacrificed on the altar of fame, and the system really has won.

The question creative people must face is this:
Do we want to be a highly paid slave, or do we want to live in freedom?

Will I tell the truth in my work, in the hope of it connecting with another human being?

Or is my own self-redaction and self-promotion worth more than genuine connection and freedom?

I choose freedom.
I choose not to wear a plastic mask or airbrush out my scars.

Authority only flows from authenticity.

But we live in a world where success is all about perception.
PR and spin is the fabric of our society.

And if we could tweak the world’s perception of us, to get ahead, would we?
Many people would (and do) play the game.

But I can’t do it, everything I have done and pioneered since my boyhood is based on learning from my own mistakes. Failures, cuts, wounds, scars have been my greatest teachers. 

__

No fighter ever wants a defeat on their record.
Nobody want’s their 0 to go.
Every fighter would love to have a Floyd Mayweather, Joe Calzaghe, Rocky Marciano perfect, unblemished history, and retire undefeated.

But that’s not reality.
The greatest fighters in history all lost.

All great boxing heroes were defeated and hit the canvas bleeding & broken at one point or another during their career. What makes them great is that they didn’t stay down on the canvas, they didn’t pretend the loss never happened, they didn’t airbrush out their past. They got up, got back in the gym, back in the studio, and kept learning, kept pushing, kept moving forward, one punch, one step, one fight at a time.

They did not allow the defeat to define them.
The defeat was only allowed to refine them.

Losses, scars, failures, reality… it’s just a springboard.
Never airbrush out the truth, own it, embrace it and show it off.
If it offends them, then they are not your tribe.

Those who want to collect my work will do so because they see something authentic in it, and hopefully something authentic in me.

People buy artists not art.

The thousands of hours of painstaking mark-making.
The blood, the toil, the insane attention to detail.

I work in leather.
Real hides, genuine cow skins.
They are not man-made, my medium is not plastic-synthetic surfaces.

Real hides have scars, and the skill is to know how to work around the scars…
Not to airbrush them out.

Own your scars, wear them like a badge of honour.

Mark Lewis Evans
London
July 2020