Toni Le Busque's stories.

Ways of coping living in a tiny town where no one ever/rarely buys/looks at your paintings/drawings.

5. Draw and ignore.*

If I worked as like, a personal banker, say, people wouldn’t just show up at my desk and sit down and start talking to me, interrupting me without an appointment, start telling me their personal problems or stories about their grandchildren or hemorrhoids.
So why do they do it to me in my studio?
They do it because they think being an artist ISN’T A PROPER JOB.
That’s why.
They think we run to no timetable and are therefore available whenever for whatever.
And then they say things like, ‘oh, how lovely it would be to just sit around drawing all day!’

Yeh, they’re right.
It is lovely to come and sit around and draw all day.
It’s divine coming to a studio all day, every day, thinking up stuff to do, good stuff, stuff with merit, stuff you will get judged on.

I’ve worked in an office, and a hardware shop, and a pub and a call centre and I’d never ever want to go back, not even for the pay cheque that people who work in ‘proper’ jobs get that us artists don’t.

But next time you want to pop in on an artist, think about whether you would want to be popped in on if you had your head under the bonnet of a car changing …whatever you do or counting out hundred pound bills….or…..

Actually, you probably would want to be interrupted.

Today’s good thing was an unexpected discussion about death that I had in the Co op with a lovely woman whose son and granddaughter I know well.
Both of us had experience unexpected deaths of close family members.
As the discussion was winding down she said, and even though I have only ever met her once before in my life. -‘Come around any time you want to talk,’
'I will,' I said, I'll come for a tea if you don't mind,'
'Yes, do,' she said.
'Funny thing,' I said, 'is that sometimes it's easier to be with people you don't know because they don't expect you to be how you were before the death because they didn't even know you before,'
'Yes,' she said, 'exactly.

And then she gave me a hug and I felt more connected-up and understood than I have in weeks.

*Drawing by Amy Waters