IT'S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE FAILURE

A little over a week left in deer season and it's not looking good. Gun season ends at 4:29 pm on Sunday. Then we switch gear and pick up the muzzleloader until Dec. 16. That's it for 2014. Every day matters at this point and today I'm pretty much shut down with pouring icy rain. Of course I can get out there, in the hut or under the treebrella, but long hours in the pouring rain usually is fruitless. Deer like to move in this shit as much as we do. I've often compared deer hunting with art making, with all it's inherent frustration and eventual futility. In many ways it's worse. I can always come up with something, art wise. Try as I might I can't make a deer materialize. Then step back and look at an art "career" of 40 years, and yes, art gets the prize in the failure department. There is no end but death. And even then (ask Shewho, who handles two dead artists, will tell you) careerism is never over.
   Deer season begins on Oct. 1 and ends on Dec. 16. Because of no work this year, it has been a total immersion season. I challenge Marina Abramovich to sit in a tree 11 hours a day in 9 degree weather, 7 days a week, trying not to cough or move, in any of her so-called endurance pieces. Simultaneously the good and bad thing about this is it is limited to a season. There may be a season for art world market artists, but for me there is none. It stretches out endlessly, promising nothing. And this is where deer hunting varies. Every turn of the head, click of the second hand, crack of a twig, promises a chance at redemption. Will that wide 8 (or an even bigger one) materialize out of the nothingness. It's happened before, I constantly remind myself. And then it's over.
   To combine hunting with my art is asking for nothing but isolation in a world of anti-gun, anti-hunter mindset, that permeates the ultra-liberal world of "the arts". You think facebook is filled with PC types? Doing this type of work and expecting the art industry to embrace it is ludicrous. Why I don't accept this is another issue altogether. And once again the parallels in not accepting my defeat in the deer woods are apparent. Persistence, perseverance, bone-headed stubbornness, call it whatever you want. When the season is over, if I come up empty, I will go through my grieving, my depression, my feeling sorry for myself, and then I will get back in the studio and try to make sense of the mess of a bed I have made for myself. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Lets just say- I am one lucky man.