olympics and art

I don't know if you got caught up in Olympic fever but although I am not a big pro sports watcher, I do get sucked into the Olympics. After 16 days of winter sports extravaganza my evenings are now free again to work on art that I don't get done during the day. However I can't help myself and have to do one blog posting about how I found the Olympians similar to artists.

After watching the athletes compete it occurred to me that we share some similarities. First off, these people train and pour themselves into their sport. Most of them do NOT get paid to be a world class curler, or a world class biathalete. No they hold a day job, and then they spend hours after work, weekends, before work committed to their love. Many will spend countless hours devoted to improving their game for the hope to compete, not even making the team.

This reminds me of being a professional artist. How many of us toil away at night on art that doesn't have a buyer? How often have you poured your soul into something, submitted it, and gotten rejected? But what do we do? We keep going. We are not unlike the Olympians who give it their all, then crash and burn on some extreme slope. We get back up, battered and bruised, and make more art. Granted we don't risk life and limb, but we put our families in jeopardy by NOT holding that stable job so that we can take a risk, to be great at what we love. Some of us will be gold medalists, we will get a big payout. But most of us don't make it to the medal stand. We work just as hard but be it bad luck, bad timing, or not having that extra something, we end up world class, but unknown to most.

Here's to ALL the Olympians, gold medals or not. And here's to YOU artists, who keep drawing, keep painting, keep submitting.