Doppelgangers

If you are an actively creative person, I will bet 1 million dollars that you know something of this experience firsthand:

You develop an idea for your work that seems to evolve naturally out of dreams/sketching/trial-and-error/memories/experimentation/the-unnameable-pool-of-inspiration, you are intrigued by the idea and follow it, and then later you discover that someone else has already had the same idea, too, and has already been taking it to some of the same places you’ve been trying to go. And maybe, just to really dig things in, they’ve been doing it for years to critical acclaim, and you’ve managed to just not know about it–until that fateful day when it all finally comes to your attention.

And then you’re like, shit. SHIT! What do I do now? Do you continue on your own path, knowing that this other person is already out there? And now you feel like an irrelevant second-rate hack, but do you comfort yourself with the knowledge that your own work is still uniquely yours, so you can go forward with it and follow it to the places it takes you, knowing that a few unintentional similarities along the way are par for the course, because there are only so many musical notes/words/colors in the world and we’re all recycling so much of the same shared sources of inspiration anyways?

I think you may be predicting where I’m going with this. Heck, maybe some of you have been thinking this for months and just haven’t told me about it! But I give you: the work of Clare Rojas. Apparently she was born in Ohio just a couple hours from where I was born, a few months before I was born, and she also makes folkie music, and, oh yeah, she also makes artwork heavily influenced by hex signs, often featuring simplified human figures, and the hex signs have at least once been used as the head of the figure. And she’s been doing this for years.

I first heard of Clare Rojas a few weeks ago when Matt brought home the latest Vitamin P book and she was featured in it. It was obvious that she was also influenced by PA Dutch designs and I just thought, cool. Her work is really beautiful and I love the way she uses color and shape! I had been working with my Hex Dancer series since mid-2010 and in recent months that work had replaced my little landscape paintings as “my main art thing,” so when I saw Rojas’s work in Vitamin P, I just thought, “nice, these are great and it’s great to see other people making work based on hex signs and patterns–and I’m surprised that more artists don’t, because they are clearly awesome–but thank god she does not do people with hex sign faces.” Then today Matt and I were talking about our various artistic influences, which lead to Googling things like hex signs (and Philip Glass’s geometry of circles piece for Sesame Street) and artistic uses of hex signs, which lead to the moment of Oh my gawd, Clare Rojas has made at least one work with a hex face and oh gawd what if people think I’m just copying her and oh gawd I didn’t know and do I keep going with this it was just getting so interesting and what what what!

Left: my most recent hex dancer drawing, made before I saw the Rojas work on the right.

This is pretty funny to me for the additional reason that a couple months ago I became aware of another artist on Etsy who in the past year or so has started making little landscape paintings on the very same wooden plaques I’ve been using (since 2006-2007), and sanding them off to make them weathered, and she uses some of the same language I do to describe them. When I came across her work, I was like, OK, but at least she is not doing round paintings. Because I kind of felt like the little round landscape paintings–especially little round landscape paintings that have been sanded to look weathered–was kind of like, my thing. But recently she has started listing round paintings. My gut reaction was NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Even though it’s quite clear to me that 1) thousands of people make landscape art, 2) I’m surprised that more people don’t use those plaques, because they’re inexpensive and pretty nice, 3) lots of painters sand their work down to rework it and lots of people must have noticed that it looks nice when sanded, 4) lots of artists sell work on Etsy. In fact there must be MORE people out there doing the same thing, I’m sure. I just don’t know about it.

I don’t know. What do you think? When this happens, do you stop or keep going? Is it even possible to keep going? Is it possible to ever make that kind of work again without thinking of your art-doppelganger’s work that’s already out there? Or are you able to just shrug it off and keep going forward? Because the work IS different, and is being made for different reasons, and will end up going in different directions at some point. That is one of the things I love most about making art: experiencing those points at which an idea shifts and you feel like you’ve been blazing a trail through a forest and suddenly a whole new path is opening up in front of you. And you follow it until it leads somewhere new. And I guess maybe sometimes your path temporarily seems similar to someone else’s path. But it’s still your path and you should follow it. Right? Maybe that’s a bad metaphor, though. Maybe when you’re able to recognize that you’re on a path, you need to start trailblazing through the wilderness?

Eh, maybe I’ll just try to do both!