What had to happen for The Substack Post to share my painting to 12 million people
Do what you love and you’ll be able to work for the rest of your life
I have wondered what quitting looks like. There is a reason so many people look at you as though you’ve said you’re a leprechaun when you say you’re an artist. There isn’t any getting around the fact it is difficult. It’s hard. Even six years in. Alongside the myriad of tasks that aren’t painting, something I find myself sinking time into is maintaining an image that speaks of effortlessness. It’s like if you admit it’s difficult, you instantly shatter this illusion of the ideal life: one of painting all day, painting for me and only me. This is doesn’t exist for anyone; certainly not when you support yourself solely through art, and, in my case, without a partner or family that funds it.
It’s perfect freedom and it’s unabated responsibility. My ability to provide myself with somewhere to live and a life to experience is reliant on my ability to paint; to close the door on everything outside the memory that I am trying to bring into existence. My painting time is precious; it’s one of the few moments I can exist in the now, banishing thoughts and unclosed loops of emails, shipping, taxes and growing my business. But there is not one without the other.
I give myself when I paint. I give myself to the moments in time that I aim to immortalise, to the time I spent at the easel, and the image that comes out. And then I give it to the world to critique. I am lucky to have found such great support and reverence in what I do, and staying the course of vulnerability and intimacy has brought me a huge amount of fulfilment. I know this isn’t normal, I know it’s a privilege, and at the risk of sounding self indulgent, I’ve often wondered how much is actually luck at all. My science brain from my days studying animal biology at university foghorns the need for rationale. Each action has an equal and opposite reaction. Sometimes it’s delayed.
I was fortunately furloughed from my job in television during Covid, but I was also ousted from my London flat with not enough income to get a new one. So I moved home to the countryside not far from London. For a couple of weeks, I said. I returned to London over a year later.
When I found myself jobless with production shut down, and in my old bedroom at my parents’, I wasn’t gallery represented and I was making hardly anything from painting; I had done a couple of art fairs and was selling my paintings in a makers’ market. Being an artist was something I did after work and at the weekends. For the first week of lockdown I did a 3000 piece puzzle and not much else. But, as it became clearer this might be the long haul, I considered the chunk of time ahead.
25 is young for a sabbatical, but that’s what I called it. An opportunity, certainly. I got up early and went to work, in my bedroom. Painting, filling sketchbooks, trying new media, and educating myself on using Instagram as tool to reach more people. I researched how to run a business. Everything was in a spreadsheet; margins, my ideal market, each painting recorded. I sold little paintings for £200 and things began growing. I took my hour of exercise walking the dog across fields, rain or shine. I snapped photos of low slate clouds over sweet summer grass and filed them into my ‘to paint’ album. Of course, this scenario is extremely lucky, but that alone does not conjure the future I found.
About 18 months ago, at the antipode of my covid existence, I painted Horizon Rain (below) in my London studio, years after leaving television and even longer after lockdown. The painting was from one of the photos taken of the fields during the pandemic. It sold quickly via the London gallery that represents me and it’s one I still think about.
Horizon Rain | 30 x 30cm | 2024 by Georgia Hart
It’s a moment walking with my mum and our now dearly missed dog, Norah. It was a photo of the genesis of all of this: what is now a six plus year long career as a working artist. Six years of growing, feeling like I’d conquered the world, feeling like no one would ever fail like I have. Feeling like I was born to do this, and feeling like I’ve made a huge mistake. Sometimes all at once.
So it’s funny that of all the paintings that I’ve shared here on Substack, Horizon Rain was featured in The Substack Post Weekender. At the top of the article and as the banner, for all 12.1 million of their followers to see.
I’ve only just started on Substack. This is the genesis. The beginning of something new as I explore the miscibility of writing and art, both things that let me slow dance with my own feelings. At the end of last week I wondered about quitting; what a ‘normal job’ would look like again. Things felt hard. Lonely and uphill. But it wouldn’t be quitting my job. It would be leaving myself. I am my art. My art is my business and I know they’re impossibly tangled like delicate necklaces. I said, out loud, ‘you could be five minutes, five days or five months away from when everything is different’.
The following day I got a notification that the official Substack account had featured Horizon Rain. It was out of nowhere, not something I asked for. I got an influx of subscribers, Instagram followers and emails. I had 21 subscribers at the beginning of this month. Some people will call this a coincidence, luck perhaps, some will call it the universe and some will call it a green light. Regardless, I am grateful to have had the reminder of the certainty that not only is the road long, but it’s hilly and bumpy and unpredictable.
Sometimes, though, you get to freewheel down the hill you crawled up, and it feels great.
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