My dear friend Marian Bantjes is in LA this week—more accurately, she’s bouncing all over Southern California, with a talk in San Diego and a show in San Luis Obispo. Last night she spoke to a packed house at Art Center.
I’ve seen Marian speak a few times before, including a triumphant turn in Denver a few years ago I captured at UnBeige. Marian’s career arc is one of my favorite stories ever. After being a conventional designer and typesetter for years, she became complacent simply turning around traditional work for clients. She decided to perform an experiment: Do only the work she loved and wait for the money to come. She gave herself one year and made no money. So she borrowed money and gave her herself six more months. Nothing. Just when the experiment was planned to end, she got a call and her second career had begun: “I felt like I went 0 to 60 in three seconds and I still don’t know what car I’m driving.”
As it stands alone, that’s a pretty inspiring tidbit for your Wednesday morning. But last night another part of her speech felt even more resonant, especially at a time where we’d all like to make more meaningful work, yet we’re valiantly attempting to affix a monetary value to our time. Sure enough, the first question during the Q&A was “How long do you spend on a piece?” followed by “How much do you charge?”
People always get hung up on the fact that Marian’s pieces are so intricate, so detailed, so labor intensive—if you look closely, you can actually see her in Illustrator making each perfect Bezier curve—that they can’t possibly be “worth” the effort. And what Marian said that struck me was this: “People always ask if I’m patient. And I don’t think I’m patient because that would infer that I’m doing something I don’t like and I’m just trying to get through it. What I am is obsessed.”
More Marian: “I do what I do because I love to do it. I would not choose to be doing anything else. And that’s why any time that’s spent working on anything is not wasted time, it’s all worth something to me, because I’m doing what I love.”
Oh, and guess what? This strategy doesn’t hold true if you don’t say no to some things. To most things, actually; Marian’s “no list” is as long as one of her meandering tendrils. But saying no is something I’ve never been able to do well—My current strategy up until now? Probably best described here—I feel guilty and negative and like I’m letting someone down. And now I’m more terrified than ever to do it.
But if I take what Marian said and translate a yes to mean I love it! (or maybe in the words of one of her most famous clients, Want it!), then a no just means a simple leave it. Leave it. Not really rejecting it, just leaving it, for someone else to come by and pluck it up. And hopefully that someone will love it.
Our time is more valuable than ever now, and we can’t go filling it with half-hearted efforts or it truly will be wasted. And that’s why I always love hearing Marian speak.
