Fake it til you make it

I've been bedridden for two days now. Down with the flu and inevitable fever. Barely moved except for bathroom breaks. (TMI? Sorry) Anyway, been using this chance out of studio to catch up with my reading and what gems i have found! One of my favourites "How to steal like an artist..." is so good that i'm going to lift an entire page off it. Hey, so I'm stealing like he's teaching - he shouldn't take offence, should be proud instead to have followers :) Anyway, here it is:


I love this phrase. There’s two ways to read it: Fake it ‘til you make it, as in, fake it until you’re successful, until everybody sees you the way you want, etc. Or, fake it til’ you make it, as in, pretend to be making something until you actually make something. I love that idea.

I also love the book Just Kids by Patti Smith. I love it because it’s a story about how two friends moved to New York and learned to be artists. You know how they learned to be artists? They pretended to be artists. I’ll spoil the book for you and describe my favorite scene, the turning scene in the book: Patti Smith and her friend Robert Maplethorpe dress up in all their gypsy gear and they go to Washington Square, where everybody’s hanging out, and this old couple kind of gawks at them, and the woman says to her husband, “Oh, take their picture. I think they’re artists.” “Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.”
The point is: all the world’s a stage. You need a stage and you need a costume and you need a script. The stage is your workspace. It can be a studio, a desk, or a sketchbook. The costume is your outfit, your painting pants, or your writing slippers, or your funny hat that gives you ideas. The script is just plain old time. An hour here, or an hour there. A script for a play is just time measured out for things to happen.

This is basically what i would do. But with all this talk of plagiarism in my faculty and people worshiping originality yet in fact very few things if any at all today are original. Well, this has re-affirmed my faith in faking it, judgy audience be damned. Now if only I could go to a new place and reinvent myself the way i want to be 'cause lets face it, you are only as believable as you can convince onlookers you are. And everyone knows how hard it is to convince people who have known you to be one way that you are in fact another. Better and easier to go off some place and come back after you have made it that they have no choice but to believe.