Endurance

Welcome back everybody. We're here at the Artists Tao podcast with Jenny and Sean Starr. We're gonna talk about our next principle, which is a great one. And it is endurance. Endurance must be cultivated to grow, take a deep breath and prepare for a long journey.

I have a lot to say about this.

Why don't you start?

Well, when I hear the word endurance, If as you know, some of the energy work I study, it's like they always put, you know, dark and light. So if you're in the dark and endurance, it seems like a slog and you're just like enduring, enduring, enduring doesn't seem great. But in the light to have endurance, you have capacity, you have strength, you've got flexibility, I feel like is all in that endurance. And to know that you're engaging with things at the best level possible that, it makes for the process to be more enjoyable.

Yeah, I guess you could look at it in those two polarities of like a positive and a negative take on it.

I mean, but like I can choose which one I can put myself in. You know what I mean? So I'm the only one that can. You know, like one school of thought is like that's enlightened duality if I'm the only one that can Decide which way to go. It's never just this or that. I'm the third party in that, you know, yeah

Yeah, so I I think this is probably one of the most important ones in the whole book to me because it's so easy to to drop out, and I'm not even talking about the larger picture of like, just stick with it until you find your spot in the world, and you know, that's true, but it's even on the micro scale, you're looking at, you know, there's roadblocks you hit in the middle of a project, and if you don't see it through, you either cut a corner and, the work isn't as good as it could have been, or you just, the worst case would be to just give up in general with the project and like scrap it. If you don't develop that endurance to stick with it through your own, you know, stuff that you're playing in your head and your own insecurities about it, like you'll never have a clue whether, you're going to end up with something that's meaningful to you, that's a genuine expression and that it's meaningful to other people. So the endurance aspect is just huge.

Must be cultivated to grow.

Yeah, I think... I heard this term once, spiritual athlete. It's like everybody in a way is an athlete. You have to keep yourself in shape. Yeah. I think.

Yeah. That's probably very true. And that does take discipline. And that's the point of cultivated is... You have to keep that in front of yourself at all times and ask yourself, So if you're doing a project with artwork that's commercial in nature, you typically are given a deadline. And you have to create that work within that framework of a deadline and do your best at it within that timeframe. And so the endurance of that is that you've got to make it happen within the timeframe and get the result that's the best result possible.

When you're talking about a project that you're doing just as a pure artistic expression that's, you know, I'm gonna make this painting, I'm gonna take as long as I want on it. If you don't have the endurance to, and I think most artists have experienced this, I know I certainly have, is you get into the real... you know, nitty gritty of the project and you realize that to get that certain effect is now gonna take a lot longer than you had anticipated. Once you start executing the little corner, you're like, oh wow. A good example is the big Buddha painting that we used for the cover of the book. You know, I worked on that for many months and there were certain parts of it like the texture and pattern, that once I started executing it, I was like, oh wow, to make this look right is gonna be a little bit of a beating. And it was, I probably spent more time on that robe than I did the rest of the painting. But if you don't endure through that, then every time you look at that painting, you're gonna look at the robe and say, wow, I really cut corners on that and now I'm not happy with it.

Yeah, and I would imagine that's probably pretty experiential. Maybe, I don't know if there's been projects. Since we have known each other, I always feel like you've had that endurance to complete it. You know it's going to take a long time, and you also can see the outcome. So I would imagine, is there some experience of not necessarily enduring it and just kind of cutting a corner and then afterwards being like, ugh.

Yeah, and that's the cultivate part is when you've cut corners, you know, which I did more when I was younger and you don't get the result that you know you could have gotten if you would have, you know, stuck it out, then you end up with something that you're like, and even if everybody or the client or whatever is like, wow, this looks great. You just, you go to yourself, okay, well, I know it could have been way cooler than this, you know.

Right.

Yeah, prepare for a long journey. Yeah, I think that's what I mean. You really have to have the mindset of its endurance in the light. You know, you're gaining capacity, you're getting stronger. Well, for me, that's where I go. This will be something that I'll be stronger in the long term.

Yeah, and Sarah from Exploredinary, I can't remember if this is what she did, what she said in the Q and A in Dallas when we screened the Nepal film there, I think is in that Q and A where she said, you know, that one of the reasons that they wanted to work with me initially, you know, seven years ago was because I was, um, I had stubbornly, I had the stubbornness to like stick with the trade of sign painting and all of that. And, um, I mean, that's the other aspect of endurance is, you know, if you've stuck it out with whatever you're doing, you know, sometimes it's just a matter of the situation to change on your behalf. And that's what happened with sign painting. Those of us that were stubborn enough to keep going with it after computers took over and, you know, people were, you know, oh, I can get cut vinyl letters now and it's... computer perfect and it's cheap. And there was this period where saying that you did something by hand and hand painted it was really looked at with disdain in the area I was at the time. After my father's death, I had moved up to Seattle and that's where Microsoft was booming and everything was high tech. And you know, the sign shop that I was working in at the time, I would ask them, I'm like, why don't we do this one in paint? This would look phenomenal in paint. And they're just like, oh man, he just doesn't get it.

So - Like would they tell Michelangelo he just doesn't get it?

Yeah, well, not a Michelangelo out there of sign painting, but -

You know, it just, you were faced with either it's time to just hang this up and get on this computerized train, or I still really love doing this. I know there's people out there that like it and I'm gonna keep going. And so you have this period of time where it's being abandoned by the public in general.

And they're all going into this new direction. I feel like this might cross over in the future, near future with AI and things like that. And then, some years go by and all of a sudden people are so over saturated with digital things that there's a whole new generation of people that are like, well, wait, I want to see what this could be done if somebody, you know, a craftsperson did this. And then sign painting all of a sudden starts to become a thing again. And then the documentary came out and the book came out and you know, it opened up a whole new opportunity for a lot of us. So. Yeah. And if, if there's not endurance in a situation like that, like you miss out on all that. And a lot of people did, you know, I knew a lot of sign shop owners that, you know, they went out and bought the machine and, you know, started cutting vinyl and slowly, you know, got rid of all the paint stuff in their shop. And, you know, might've built nice little businesses for themselves financially.

But when sign painting really started to have a renaissance and people started asking for it again on a much larger scale, I did see some of those people resurface and they were really like, wow, I used to paint signs. It's like, well, yeah, but you stopped. You could have rolled that into something new.

When you were, how did you endure that time that you were working at the sign shop? So for you personally, I know, I know it was creative. I think from what you said, it was creative. You had, you were kind of getting to be creative, but so what did you do after hours? Anything? Or was it, it was, it was a period of pure survival.

It lasted about four and a half, five years where I was working in sign shops up there that there, it was all digital only. There was no work you could find anywhere doing painted work. And, um, like I said, there was a disdain, you know, you couldn't find anybody that, that wanted to hire somebody to do something painted, at least in the sphere I was in. I mean, there might've been guys out there. Um, and, I was trying to make the best of that situation and, um, you know, learn. I did have an employer that, you know, you know, sent me to color theory classes and gave, you know, gave me training and things like that on how to, you know, work computers, you know, years and years ago. And I'm grateful that I had that training because it did add a whole new layer of understanding to the work that I had been trained to do all by hand, I kind of started to understand the principles behind a lot of it better, as well as learned how to use the computer, which needed to be incorporated in some level and just operating a business. But my creative outlet was doing things at home on the weekends.

So. Building a deck.

Painting, you know, still messing around with like pinstriping brushes and just doing little hobbyish decorative things and painting murals in my house and doing all sorts of things that kind of kept me moving until I figured out I absolutely hate this. I don't ever want to do this. And I'm going back to painting signs, even if I starve, which I came close to, until it kicked in. But, I mean, that's just part of a learning process. But again, it's the endurance. I never let that go. It took me several years to figure out, like, what do I do from here? But I didn't just walk away from it.

Yeah, I feel like, did you have an idea that, you know, you must have had a good attitude of, yes, I'm enduring this process, and you felt like it was leading you to something else? Did you feel like, I had a terrible attitude.

I did.

Was it like enduring like, I'm just going to, you know.

No, it was just a stubborn thing in the background because, you know, I was going through some really, really heavy duty depression and I was, you know, in the final years of a failing marriage. And yeah, it was pretty bleak. The upside is, is when I came out of that and got into a new situation, it was almost like this, and you're running here, you're running there, you're doing this, you're agreeing to, yeah, I'll do that show and I'll go over here. It was pretty insane, probably. But there was so much pent up stuff of working through the personal issues of my life that when I was able to fully be working creatively again, it was like an explosion.

I was just, I was everywhere doing everything and everything was just like bright colors.

So do you feel like now after having that experience, when you think of enduring something, you know that it's for a higher purpose? Like there's something, there's going to be fruit at the end of that rather than like kind of just not knowing, getting angry about it.

I don't even think it's like there's a reward at the end type thing. It's more, I tried the other way and it was miserable. And I don't have any intention of being miserable again. So it's more, these are the things that I have observed have led to good results in working and living as an artist and supporting myself as an artist. And these are the things that work. Like these don't end up in me being miserable and depressed and you know, out of my mind. So these are the things that I'll do.

Prepare for a long journey.

Yeah, it is definitely that.

That's good, huh?