Art & Fear: An open letter to actors
January 3, 2011 | 5 comments
Another year down. If you’re anything like me, New Year is a time to reflect on what you’ve been up to for the past 12 months, and to think about what your plans should be for the next 12.
2010 was a pretty unusual year for me. As with most creative industries (film & TV being no exception), photography has been in a tremendous state of flux and change. Digital imaging technology, the internet and mass amateurization have radically altered the business of photography. While there’s never been so many good images being produced, the professional value of photography has become pretty fraught.
Last March I was feeling a little burnt out from shooting hundreds of actors, arguing with old fashioned agents, and hustling for celebrity and editorial work that was paying less and less, and all the while seeing my headshot style ripped off left, right and centre.
So I shut the studio down and went on hiatus for a few months, looking for some inspiration.
Through the spring and summer I travelled to Barcelona, Greece, up the coast of Turkey to Istanbul, Bulgaria and through the countryside of Romania, to Budapest, Hungary; to the caribbean for a month to dive and write and lie on the beach, and more recently to Iceland, to spend time in the Westfjords, my ears ringing from the silence.
It’s impossible not to learn some things about yourself when you make this kind of radical change in how you spend your time. What I learned is that despite the success I had created, I had been coasting. I was doing a great job of the photography work that was coming to me regularly, but that’s all I was doing. It had become a job. I had become a craftsman, and stopped being an artist.
“Commissioned art has a way of sliding slowly and imperceptibly into commercial trade…. The challenge in such circumstances is to convince the patron that you alone know the right way to make the piece.”
- From Art & Fear, David Bayles & Ted Orland
Maybe, as an actor, you know what this feels like.
The commercial audition process can be addicting, and seeing yourself in a guest starring role in a Canadian TV show is definitely a thrill (believe me – the first job I ever had as an actor was on a cop show called Blue Murder as a former Olympic runner who gets gunned down in a case of mistaken identity. It was barely a role but it felt like I had won the lottery).
But is standing beside a Jetta with your arms crossed or playing a badly written stereotype what you picture when you think about what’s really satisfying about being an actor? When you first decided this is what you really want to do, did you envision shoring up your self esteem after losing an SOC commercial, or being afraid to call your agent even though you’re not sure what he does for you? For most actors in this city, the only really good, meaningful work they get to do is in an acting class. Is that what you thought it would be like?
Like I was, there’s a decent chance you’re been coasting too. It’s easy, in the assembly line visits to Powerhouse or the routine of your weekly scene study, to forget that you, too, are capable of and interested in making art. You are an artist. Your job, to a very large extent, is to communicate with others about your ideas, your experience and your point of view, in order for them to better understand the world they live in.
How do we forget this?
The short answer is that as we get older the pressures of life increase, and suddenly the thought of putting on impromptu guerilla performances of Sexual Perversity in Chicago in west end dive bars starts to seem a little irresponsible compared to paying your student loans back or having furniture you haven’t salvaged from the side of the road. We make this worse when we compare ourselves to people who took the expected life path; who have been working in corporate jobs for years, and are buying nicer cars and bigger houses and having families. Or worse to other artists who have “made it” in ways we haven’t.
But there’s another reason we stop making art and start making widgets, and that reason is fear.
“Fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing you own work.”
- From Art & Fear, David Bayles & Ted Orland
As artists we fear all kinds of things: we seek approval, worry about being judged, about not being talented enough, not having the magic “it”; we feel like we need to be perfect, or we worry about being pretenders. As an actor you’re probably intimately acquainted with fear. Forcing yourself to be vulnerable is hard enough among trusted peers in an acting class, but doing the same thing in front of a bored camera operator, or worse in a commercial audition room with a gang of type-A advertising jerkoffs staring blankly at you from the other side of a folding table is almost inconceivable.
The message in casting is usually clear: you’re not here to make art, you’re here to meet our expectations.
As artists, we have to learn to balance these things, because if we don’t they will destroy us creatively. I’m speaking from experience. By last March, in catering to my fears about being understood, accepted and ultimately successful, I had crippled my ability to do any of those things effectively. I had stopped trying to communicate entirely, and had instead started only trying to meet expectations.
Since then I’ve made a lot of changes, both to my perspective and how I’m spending my time. I’m back in Toronto in a great house with a home studio I can live and work out of. Every Friday we set up for an entire day of shooting actors. A big focus this year is my production company, Flyweight Films, which produces documentary and other content for the web and beyond.
If 2010 was a year of explosive change, 2011 is a year of organizing, producing and artmaking. Whereas balancing commercial trade (however creative) and doing work that was deeply satisfying to me seemed like an impossibility a year ago, today it feels like the only path.
So I’ll make you a deal. There’s still no one in this city who understands contemporary headshots like me. I’ll continue to help you guys get into those audition rooms, if you promise to make at least part of your focus this year creating work – either alone or with other people – that you’re really interested in. If you’re going to do student films seek out scripts you actually like, or write a script about your life, rent a camera and make your own. If there’s a theatre role you want to do, produce the show yourself. If you have something to share with other actors, start a blog or host a workshop. Find a high vision and work it.
And if you need a collaborator you can always get in touch with me.
Chris Frampton, Toronto 2011
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Wow.
Very, very well said.
Thanks Emily! I appreciate the repost.
[...] other news, first off I want to share this pretty fantastic blog post I found: from Chris Frampton, on Art and Fear. Ironically, it sums up a lot of my own thoughts as of [...]
Hi Chris… a good reminder of the artistic journey not being about “getting somewhere” rather than finding the art in our process and creation. Fear was once described to me as , “False, Evidence, Appearing, Real”…. but yet I go through stages where I’m fear-driven instead of artist-driven and it’s a hard place to crawl out of….it usually happens when I’m on the cusp of a breakthrough in my work, or surrendering to a new level…. as long as artists keep sharing their journey, like you have, I think we’ll be able to continue inspiring each other to GO . Thanks for post
Thanks for the great comment Kate. False Evidence Appearing Real is a great way to sum it up, actually.