Artists know how difficult it is to shake off a first impression. No matter how much they grow and change, they create an impression in the minds of their fans.
Bob Dylan went through this when he went electric.
The Beatles transformed from bowl cuts and black suits to shaggy hair and psychedelics. But it’s still “Help”, and “I want to hold your hand” to millions. Transforming that first impression is hard. Maybe impossible for some.
The fans come for feeling, consistency, familiarity.
Dave Matthews Band has had a good run, number-one song is still “Crash.”
For Pearl Jam, Ten still pays the bills. Their debut album gets the streams, 30 years later.
And it’s not just music.
Eddie Murphy changed his tune. He ditched the dirty jokes in favor of family movies like The Nutty Professor. But he is still remembered for those early bits from Delirious and Raw, a young Eddie, wearing leather jumpsuits and saying outrageous shit.
Where else does this hold true? Where else do we hold people back from the change they are making?
Family, friends, coworkers? They miss the old you.
They ask how the homebrewing is coming along. But I haven’t homebrewed in seven years.
They ask how your marathon training is going. I haven’t run in five.
Tell them what’s happening now, they can’t hear you, they are stuck. Who you are to them cannot be easily changed.
And you do it too, inadvertent as it might be. Can the yard guy do fences, pressure washing? No, he does the lawn. He’s just a kid! Meanwhile, the kid has kids, and employees, and went to night school.
If you want to build and create, you may need to move on and find new fans. Leave your early work behind.
Michael Lewis recently released an audiobook version of his classic, Liar’s Poker. He read it himself and found parts of the book “literarily embarrassing” because he was “learning to write a book, by writing a book.” There is no doubt that Michael Lewis has refined his craft over 30+ years, but for many fans in the finance industry, it’s all about Liar’s Poker. Still.
It’s hard to understand why fans, customers, and friends, don’t grow along with you. Instead, you grow apart, but that is mostly wrong. More likely, one of you is growing, the other is staying put. Maybe that is what differentiates creators and consumers. Consumers stick with what is comfortable, familiar, and easy.
Art is always changing. Otherwise, it’s just painting by numbers. Copywork.
You don’t walk into your favorite burger joint excited because they improved the secret sauce. Unless you are a foodie, you want that same sesame seed bun too.
That’s fine, people like what they like. Especially with art, these old pieces of work anchor them to memories and friends. A time and a place. It’s about Nostalgia.
But as an artist, your job is to grow, explore, and push boundaries. Pull as many of those fans as you can along with you. New points of view. New mediums. You can change them.
An artist is a creator.
A painter is different. Using the same tools and a skillful approach, they may simply recreate.
Overseas you’ll find warehouses full of painters, recreating famous works like The Starry Night, but Van Gogh they are not.
So as a professional, if you refuse to be replaced by the machines, you are an artist.
Your current customers, current fans, and current buyers, they may come to rely on you for certain things, certain services. At some point, those may not feel like art anymore. It may feel like painting by numbers. Whitewashing fences.
And it’s at that point you have a decision to make.
You have to decide what type of person you want to be. And while you’d welcome those people to walk with you into this new chapter of your life. This new, challenging, boundary pushing work. You need to know that many of them will hang back where they are more comfortable. You’ll need to find new fans.
And maybe that’s the point.
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