Personal and Professional

So, last week I didn't have time for the blog after all (first time is a year and a half), but that's because I was too busy with lecture+masterclass combo in Kiev together with my personal shoot and time with extended family. I will post a lot of materials from lecture the following weeks, but today I wanted to address (and expand) a question I got during mater-class from Alex.

The initial question was, should I separate professional and personal Instagram accounts. And my quick answer was yes, because your personal stuff won't be relevant to your audience. And later I thought, wait a minute, my whole practice is built on personal stuff, from travel to holidays to illness to conflict - it's basically a fuel of my creative process. But again everything is more complicated than that.

Think about your favorite song, say for example it's "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica. When you listen to it, I bet you don't think who the James Hetfield meant or wrote this song for, which conflict fueled his brain or what personal trouble made the song form in his head. Instead most of us think of ourselves - whom we love so much that  we are ready to stand with them against the whole world and "nothing else matter", or maybe who we heard this song with or even how we felt as teenagers when we discovered and loved this song at the first place. I think it's a secret of art - it's not about you, the artist. It's only about you for you.

So then by this logic your viewers want to see the tenderness in your work, but not a selfie with the person you feel so tender about; want to feel the conflict, but not hear gossipy details of your fight with your boss. Because they want to take this feeling and make it their own, to feel their tenderness or their conflict more fully because you showed them how. Which mean the art should be personal enough to be genuine, but still have enough space for viewer to fit in.

In life you hear details of person's story to discover how they feel; in art you need to have deeper level (feeling) without explanatory level (personal details) - I think that's the trick of it all:)