Private art

I guess it's kind of oxymoronic to start a thread for people to talk about private art but here it goes. I've been thinking about how what with the Internet etc. these days it seems really rare for people to create art (music, writing, painting, whatevs) just for themselves and not share it in any way. Do you do anything like this? Create art just for your own enjoyment? Do you think this is a cool thing to do or is too selfish (obviously it's selfish by design but is this a good or bad thing)?

I was thinking it would be fun to have a band that writes songs and plays and maybe records but never releases the recordings publicly and never even tells anyone that they're in a band, which seems fun to me but also I don't think I could do it because I really like talking about my creative projects.

speaking for myself, i compose violin concertos in my spare time but i never really care if anyone hears them.

Man this is the majority of what I do. It grew out of a need to be oblique about things when living with my parents. They'd read my journals & look at my sketchbooks, and I knew it, so I started expressing myself in writing & drawing in a way designed to be comprehensible only to myself. And I never really stopped. I feel like any time I have tried to make something for a larger audience, it's come out really stilted. This feeling would probably would go away with practice – I've just spent a lot more time making art for myself and so it feels more natural.

When I had a guitar, too, I would sit in my room and doodle around on it, hit record on the cassette player and make up songs. I made up a whole tape full of songs about towns I had been to in Idaho. I never played it for anyone and I don't have it anymore. They weren't good songs.

I pirate art. It's private only because no one else sees it.
But do you really want to see my counterfeit guernica?
I do it because I can't afford the real thing.

I remember reading about Henry Darger for the first time back in 2000 or so, how he had thousands of pages of writing and all those pictures that almost no one knew about until he died. I thought that was probably the best model for making art.

Private press LPs to thread.

Story time: One of my BFFs in Tokyo had a REALLY nasty break-up with his college GF (who he lived with at the time), she was secretly involved with another member of their band, and then finally came out to him about it. Their band broke up, and even the new couple broke up not long after. My friend was totally withdrawn and messed up from all this. Eventually she moved back to her hometown, which was very far away from Tokyo. About 7-8 years later she sent him an album's worth of material recorded on 4-track to cassette. A formal apology in music and song. He let me listen to it and it was amazing, seriously it ranks as one of my favorite records of all time.

I mean, he ripped the songs to mp3 so that I could listen to them.

i've been filling sketchbooks for years now, i rarely show it to anyone and i like that i can choose to keep it private if i want. i don't treat it all like a diary or even think of it as very personal, i just like the feeling of it being completely free from any sort of self-consciousness.

i think most people need a public

- to act as a muse
- to provoke a spirit of engagement
- to provide feedback on whether what they're doing is working

can you imagine stand-up comedy with no audience? the subtraction of live audiences from sitcoms is why they became so horrible: the actors didn't have to earn their laughter

there's the famous story of andre gregory and several actors doing rehearsals of uncle vanya for months in an abandoned theatre in times square, with no thought of ever actually launching a production of it, but even then they invited people to come see it.

I let some stuff out but I keep a fair amount to myself. self-promotion is such a hassle. as I get older the odds increase that fewer and fewer people are going to care about the stuff I make anyway, so it's liable to become more of a private/personal affair as time goes on

i think most people need a public

- to provoke a spirit of engagement

there's something to this though - nothing happens in a vacuum so everything tends to be created with an audience in mind, even if it's an imaginary one

yeah I think this is all interesting because it's really common for musicians to say "I just write music for myself, I don't care what other people think but if they like it, great" but meanwhile they're doing press interviews and signing to labels etc., which isn't a criticism but obv if you're going to all that effort you have to care what other people think. I think art as a conversation is fantastic, but I also have real respect for people who don't need to have that conversation and are satisfied with a monologue.

yeah, i shouldn't have been so absolute, because i often imagine a hypothetical "audience", so its not truly free of self-consciousness. its just a matter of degrees. i know that i can potentially keep all of it private, and most of it will be private, so i can use the sketchbook as a place to experiment and play around.

I make an effort to regularly draw/sketch/doodle even (actually especially) if its just mind-wandering shapes and abstract machines and plants and patterns and stuff

altho last night I wasted a few minutes doodling Vaughn Bode characters

I feel like one of the reasons I'm no longer as actively creative as I was when I was younger is that back then, it was always assumed that whatever I produced would be mostly private, whereas now, because I am older and also because the possibility of wide dissemination exists, I frequently end up asking myself what the point is.

I'm constantly wishing I could return to the mindset of making art/music/whatever just for the joy of trying stuff out, without any specific goals or expectations beyond the sense of accomplishment of having created something.

I frequently end up asking myself what the point is.

Not in an existential way, just like "who am I doing this for? what do I intend to get out of it?"

Or maybe I've just naturally become lazy and disengaged.

amusement? I think the necessity of private art becomes more pronounced
If you're in prison or in a boring lecture or something.

About 90% of my writing is this. And about 50% of my drawing/painting.

I think it's kind of important to keep something just for yourself, that has no pressure from external sources, so you keep a little tiny place where you can be completely pure.

eh I don't know about the pure/not pure dichotomy here

Well, that's my motivation for keeping my stuff private. Pure meaning, partly, I don't have to worry about other people's expectations or interpretations and I can let my id run wild knowing no one else will draw conclusions about it. But also, whenever I've created stuff for money, there is that idea of a client who has a say in the end result, no matter how much freedom you are given, it is still ultimately for someone else. But you are probably talking about doing stuff more for show (whether that's just on SoundCloud or DeviantArt or a blog or something you don't get paid for) rather than commerce. But still, knowing that no one else WILL EVER SEE IT does make me feel a lot more free to not rein in impulses I would otherwise keep in check.

yeah, i don't know about private art. i draw a lot to pass the time, in boring lectures, meetings or whatever. but this isn't private art. it's doodling, unfocused creative activity. if i'm pleased with the results, i think about what i could do with them, how i could make them public. but i'm a narcissist, so...

other side of the coin is what WD and abbbottt are talking about: a freedom from expectation, constraint and interpretation, the ability to create without having to second-guess or correct things in response to imagined judgment. i don't do that, but like the idea.

I feel like one of the reasons I'm no longer as actively creative as I was when I was younger is that back then, it was always assumed that whatever I produced would be mostly private, whereas now, because I am older and also because the possibility of wide dissemination exists, I frequently end up asking myself what the point is.

i am the opposite of this

whenever i make something i want people to see it NOW

guys, can you come into the bathroom for a second? i really want to show you something!

haha

I think there's a lot of private art that goes on when a person is already an artist in some other medium. So a musician might paint privately, etc..

whenever i make something i want people to see it NOW

I guess I'm like that, too -- but when I was younger, it was necessarily limited to my friends and family, which made me less self-conscious about it.

I'm not self-concious so much as quality control oriented. I'm happy with most of my stuff, but I only want to show people the stuff I'm really happy with.

i used to be so finicky about what i would show people and whether what i did was any good and i would obsess over it and then i just got older and stopped smoking weed and said fuck it life's too short to be precious forever

xxp I think it's partly a matter of expectation: I used to get so much pleasure from the simple act of having created something. There was never any thought of "now what am I going to do with it?" beyond "show my friends."

And it's easier to be satisfied with what you do when those expectations aren't looming.

Blah. Getting depressed about this again.

^^^ I have to put other people's expectations (or what I imagine other people's expectations might be) completely out of my mind otherwise I can't do anything.

"but this isn't private art. it's doodling"
ha! i feel like this is besmirching a long and honorable tradition of doodling. isn't the bulk of what they found in darger's apt doodles?

I dunno, Darger's methods seemed pretty elaborate from what I could tell

Yeah a lot of pretty elaborate tracing/collaging. The guy seems too single-minded to just make relaxed shitty doodles.

yeah, that's the distinction. darger was clearly trying to get his shit just so, to deliver on the vision. doodling is aimless. honestly, my doodles are way better than what i produce when i try to "deliver on the vision". my best paintings are just big doodles. the trick is to distract yourself from the canvas in the act of falling towards it.

think he used a photo enlarger too...? that's like the opposite of doodling.

I liked the results of Darger's art because the intense combo of secret + prolific lead to this avalanche houseful of WTF after he died. This couldn't really happen if you steadily released art to the public your whole life.

so darger never had like a brainstorming sheet with alternate titles, some of them crossed out, but the ones he really liked circled and starred, with grocery lists in the margins surrounding proto-metallica logos?

I don't really think Darger's life is any kind of model to live by, though.

xp lol

I agree that doodling is awesome and productive FWIW. Also just a good mental activity for practicing creativity and clearing your thoughts!

i did this for the longest time, mostly under the guise of wanting to focus on my technique. eventually people began helping me out and spreading the word and it has become a career of sorts. i would probably be further along if i had been a self promoter, but this feels very natural and comfortable.

Without an audience, I'm pretty much paralyzed by seeing art-making as pointless - it's the reason I've never been able to journal, I narrate and analyze my way through the day, what point is there in writing it down after the fact?

Which means I should find some kind of local arts group that holds critiques and classes and stuff, but I haven't really found one yet.

I take a lot of pics, in fact I organize my free time around going out to take pictures. but I'm really lax about sharing it. I've got a library of photos that I like but I'm not too sure about, and half the times I feel like I end up selecting a photo that I don't really like to share because I feel other ppl will like it.

can you imagine stand-up comedy with no audience?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqJcLC_vcsk