What’s the Point of Creating When No One Cares?

 

 

What’s the Point of Creating When No One Cares?

by Damian Osborne

 

Last night I had a dream where I heard this beautiful viola and piano sonata being played. It was in C or Am. I don’t know if I was playing, or if it was two other musicians, but the music was my own, and people were listening and enjoying it.

I woke up with the deep nasal tone of the open C string of the viola still in my ears. Then I started wondering if I even wanted to start writing this sonata.

I knew it would take time and be challenging. And I have a lot of paintings and drawings that I’m already working on simultaneously. It gets exhausting. What’s the point of creating all the time and being unable to stop?

Also, I know it’ll just be another sonata sitting on my external hard drive. And even my paintings and drawings just end up in drawers or cluttering up my studio because — let’s face it — my art and music isn’t for everyone.

 

Humour and silliness

I often ask myself what’s the point of creating anything when it’s not like I’m changing the world. I sink into a funk easily if I lose my pluck from a lack of reception for my work. 

After I get tired of myself, and to address these feelings, I resort to a kind of rebellious silliness. Maybe it’s a natural instinct to ‘get over it’ with dumb humour. 

If no one cares, what does it matter? Why should I be so serious about my great oeuvre of ‘masterpieces’? No one cares. 

Perfection is for myself, not to show off to others. It’s because I believe in what I’m doing anyway, and it doesn’t matter if no one ‘gets’ it. If I do a half-job, it’ll bother me.

 

A caprice and a cute drawing

So I started something a little different. I started writing a light-hearted caprice on the piano called “No One Cares”. It’s a very easy piece and not meant to impress anyone.

I also started working on a silly watercolour/gouache painting of one of our new kittens, Gregory Bon Jovi, playing the caprice on the piano, surrounded by an audience of appreciative little animals. 

The piano piece is ‘Caprice No.2 in C’. C for cats and it’s meant for cat paws, so I composed it with mostly 2nds (hitting two white notes next to each other at the same time).

It’s mostly easy block chords in 3/4 meter. Although, there are some passages which would require an extremely dexterous, supernatural cat. Or maybe it’s a piano piece meant for ‘four paws’. Whatever. I would be quite impressed if Greg could play it. Especially the arpeggiated chords, trills and other ornaments. He loves music by the way.

I had a dream about a yellow snake, so I included it in my drawing. I looked up what yellow snakes are supposed to mean, but gave up because the internet is full of bullshit.

The little speckled mousebird was a chick that I tried to save, but failed. I was upset. It was probably going to die anyway, or maybe I was an idiot and squirted water into its lungs when trying to feed it with a little syringe. Its name was Spike. So Spike is now immortalized in art forevermore.

The tropical house gecko, garden inspector butterfly, greater red musk shrew and rain spider are favourite foods of Greg’s, but in this case he’s so honoured by an audience that is actually paying attention, that he’ll maybe eat them tomorrow.

The Eastern leopard toad likes the deep bass resonance of the piano. So he’s chilling with his bum on the sustain pedal because Greg can’t reach with his short little pawses.

WTF indeed.

 

 

BTW, here are two quick pen studies of Pebbles and Greg:

 

 

 

 

The pigments I used

The painting was done solely from my own gouache paints. Most of the pigment I gathered from the wild myself.

I used a limited palette of eggshell white (from our millions of eggshells), gold ochre from the Constantia vineyards, red ochre from the Eastern Cape Langkloof, vine black from the Constantia vines, and manganese ore I found.

Also, I found a really nice purplish maroon ochre while on a hike in Cape Town. It’s 450 million-year-old maroon Graafwater Shale from the Ordovician Period (before vertebrates!).

I also used harder minerals like sodalite blue and amethyst from Namibia (I discovered the commercial amethyst watercolour is fake!), as well as yellow jasper (super hard, like 7 mohs).

Later, I needed a bright red, but couldn’t source any cochineal bugs or madder root (I need to take a trip up the Eastern Cape again to find cochineal-infested cacti). So I just crushed up a bright red chalk pastel and mulled it with gum Arabic.

Gouache is a bit like watercolour, only a bit more opaque and with a higher concentration of pigment to binder. Sometimes calcium carbonate or barium sulphate is added to increase opacity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some process videos

Knock yourself out with these cute short clips I took with my phone — making pigments and painting animals:

 

Making watercolour paint from 450 million-year-old maroon ochre.

 

 

 

 

Lyrics and music

Here’s the sheet music and lyrics, which I hope you enjoy. I found a fun cat synth which had me LOLling!!:

 

 

So what’s the point of creating?

As an artist have you ever wondered what the hell the point of it all is?
Really. No one gives a shit!

What’s the point of writing this? No one is going to read it. No one reads anyway. Creating art is like shouting into a storm of a million voices. I might as well not exist or have ever existed.

Cue tiny violin music: an elegy played by a cicada from his new solo gypsy-jazz album ‘Cicadian Rhythm’.

As I drink my morning coffee and look around at the mess in my studio, the sun rises rapidly, making a jar of linseed oil glow like bright amber on the windowsill.

This is my second favourite alone-time. The day is still so full of potential; it is still untainted by the cacophony, chaos and vexations of the world around.

There’s always a long list of stuff to do and inevitably I still believe I’ll make full use of this beautiful day. It never goes to plan obviously. The ratio of amazing imaginary creations and inspirations, and the actualisation of them is probably 99 to 1.

Why am I always giving myself another thing to do? Who cares?

My favourite time is actually at night. Though I’m used to dealing with the list of unfulfilled goals at the end of every day, there are less distractions, and I enjoy the liminal space between the material world and the ‘spiritual’ realm of art.

Perhaps I need a muse. Is a muse supposed to be someone who appreciates and understands all of your creations? Someone who responds with deep emotional resonance and sympathetic commentary?

For a relatively obscure artist or composer, there’s generally nothing reflected back. Not even crickets (or cicadas). The crickets would be a welcome response of a thousand little cheers.

One may receive a perfunctory ‘That’s nice’ from friends and family. Or a host of captious remarks from people who think they’re smarter than you, though they have never tried to create anything in their lives.

Why create for friends or family anyway? Perhaps there’s a problem if friends and family are one’s only audience. Why be vulnerable in front of them? Seems like a really bad idea. Can one still create art without an audience, real or imaginary?

 

Why do Creatives need validation from others? Do they?

The constant. Striving. For. Validation. Oh my word! Hours wasted in dedication to someone. It’s a kind of narcissism maybe? Expecting people close to you to have the same interests as you.

Or maybe dreaming of some imaginary fan club or audience. Perhaps in the future when A.I. has destroyed the human race and there are only a handful of dirty survivors who magically find your secret external HDD or paintings in your studio (because, well, the paintings never left the studio) and somehow they still have the obsolete technology to go through your 4gig HDD, find your music files, find a way to play them, and maybe one guy (who knows how to use a mouse and Debian Linux) will grunt to the other guy who’s foraging for rodents and say, “Not bad. Very Neo-Baroque but with a early 21st century pop harmonic structure, hybrid progressive folk, world music vibe.”

Maybe I should stop giving a shit too and not take things so seriously.

Or is the art born in solitude, without the thought of an audience, more authentic and rarefied? Maybe more elitist because, well if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. 

I remember hearing a quote by famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich who said that when you play, it is the audience who is lucky enough to hear you.

Beethoven created music because he had to. What compelled this intense genius to keep composing (and some of his best, most intimate and emotional works) when he couldn’t even hear his own music being played?

When I think of that, all self-pity and the need for validation goes right out the window. I get that compulsion. Beethoven needed to write this music down, because he needed to get it out of his head! It didn’t matter that he couldn’t hear it outwardly. He heard it in his soul.

Don’t sit there moping. Join a community of creatives. Any community.

I joined an online community of composers in 2024. So I put out my question about “What’s the point of creating?” on this platform, and though it’s for composers, I think it fits for any sort of artist too.

The feedback helped me feel encouraged and the conversation became quite popular on the forum. I think it was enlightening and uplifting for all who engaged.

 

The grand and clichéd conclusion:

Yes. No one gives a shit. But neither do I anymore, and that’s cool.

It’s interesting to note how feeling isolated as an artist or composer is quite a common phenomenon.

I’m not going to stop composing and painting. Because, l love it and it’s part of my identity. And I just need to think of Beethoven, because not even the host of hell could stop him from writing music. Hell. How many artists have there been who could only paint with their mouth or foot?

So I’ll also think of Rostropovich too and consider it a privilege for others to experience my art or music. Perhaps my ego will explode, but that would be more fun than moping anyway.

 

Thanks for reading my long and boring essay. It was a post of absolute and total narcissism, but I hope it wasn’t only me that enjoyed it. Over and out.

 

Oh wait, here’s the caprice if you still haven’t heard it.