I’m a hoarder, but probably not the way you think.
I don’t hoard clothes or magazines or collectibles or senseless junk.
I hoard the things I create.
Let me explain.
A few years back, while working at a theater company, the Artistic Director told me about a critical inflection point in any artist’s life: the moment their skill intersects with their taste.
He was adamant that you want to set a high bar with the things that influence you (Said another way: garbage in, garbage out). However, no artist starts in a place where they can work at the level of the masters. They must first create for the sake of learning their craft.
And this process is fucking hard.
You have to be bad at something before you can be good at it, let alone great. Embarrassment is the cost of entry. But with enough practice and work, an artist can eventually find themself in a place where they’re creating on the same level as the masters who first inspired them.
As a culture, we love the idea of overnight success. We love to believe that talent is immediately recognized. This simply isn’t true. Any artist who seems to suddenly take off has, in all likelihood, spent years toiling in obscurity while refining their craft.
And all too often, artists choose to perpetuate the “overnight success” myth by sweeping everything they’ve made up to that point under the rug.
I’m a hoarder because I hoard all of the art I’ve made up to now.
I don’t want you to see it because most of it’s not very good. It’s embarrassing. It’s not refined. It’s not perfect. It’s not “on brand.”
But a piece of art stuffed in a drawer fails in its basic function of connecting humans to one another.
With this in mind, I recently decided to re-release the web series my fellow theater apprentices and I shot in the summer of 2016.
We were young. We had no idea what we were doing. We just wanted to make stuff and put it out in the world. So that’s what we did.
It’s stupid. It’s absurd. It’s not very good. But we made it together.
It’s a snapshot of where we were at a moment in our lives.
And that’s makes it something worth sharing.
Sunday Shorts is a web series originally released in 2016. It follows the misadventures of Tara, Josh, Hannah, Luciana, Bethany, Colleen, Dan, and Lauren, a group twenty-something theatre kids committed to putting on a show you’ll never forget. Episodes available on YouTube, starting Sunday, October 15th.
And now for something completely different: doorways and David Bayles on quantity over quality
joshua chamberlain 