My second job was as a commercial artist. I worked at the municipal library as the staff artist. My job was to move books, and I did. Some of the librarians weren’t certain of my aesthetics at first, but when they started having real problems keeping the display shelves full, they backed off and let me work.
At the time, I was in my first semester of college and I’d started with an art class since I’d oil painted for years. In some respects, it’s miraculous that I was as successful as I was at the library. I’d never had formal art training. I based everything on what I learned from studying Pop artists, like Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Johns, and the like.
When I got stuck, I thought, “What would Warhol do?” and did that.
I had a sense of rightness and confidence that now startles me. I have to remind myself that most people have the same feeling of invincibility at that age.
All this was before I realized I was at a school that preferred fine art over commercial art. I loved graphic design and typography. They wanted non-objective ceramics. At least it was easy for me to see the difference, although I disagreed that commercial art was any less valuable. If anything, it’s more important. We’re immersed in commercial art; commercial art is the gateway to fine art for the general population.
Curiously, my gut feeling about the importance of commercial art didn’t carry over to writing. I was much more swayed by the opinions of my professors. I wrote poetry and short, tight fiction (prose poems and flash fiction, I know now). It was all very well, but real writers published in university journals, spent weekends at writers’ conferences, and got their MFAs. They crashed at friends’ houses and ate macrobiotic tofu. (All my teachers were hippies, apparently. It was the late 80s, after all.)
Somehow I completely accepted the myths I was fed around the written word–so well, that it took me 20 years to overcome it. I don’t have to fit into a mold to be a writer.
I don’t have to wait.
All I have to do is write. I have all the validation I need right here.