Journey

Though I have loved anything to do with creating something out of nothing for as long as I can remember, I have become a serious artist quite late in my life. I have spent a good many years second-guessing myself, changing the direction of where I am happily headed to please those who appear to be cheering me on in this new phase of life. Confidence in myself and my choices has been hard-won. It is easily shaken even today.

But not as easily as it was once. The reason has been the selection of three of my paintings in art prizes this year. I entered a total of five prestigious Australian prizes this year. I was accepted in two. Both are respectable names on the local art scene. My acceptance into them has made me feel like I belong. I am not an impostor.

My friends and family have supported my journey with fierce love. I have been inundated with encouragement, praise and even advice. Some I have actively sought. Some has been given without me asking. Everyone whose support has encouraged me wants to offer advice with the best of intentions, though not necessarily any knowledge or idea of what the industry is about. Their advice has come from their own preferences in art or hunches about what is likely to be snapped up by a certain demographic. It is endearing.

It is also exhausting. When they ask expectantly, ‘So did you win a prize?’, it feels like a very disappointing thing to report you haven’t. They look back at you either sympathetically or with bafflement because they have been certain your work was worthy of a prize and they voted for you too, dammit. Both responses can deflate your joy in a matter of moments. You sound defensive when you insist that being selected in such an important prize is an honour in itself. This doesn’t matter when you’re Pakistani. Only winning an actual prize proves your success.

It doesn’t though. It really isn’t just about winning, clichéd though that sounds. It is about your work having been looked over by a panel of judges. It is about your work having made the cut. It is about your work being selected to be shown in a prestigious location in a city you have called home for only six years. It is about the hundreds of people who have come to look at your work, who have thought about it, imagined the hand behind it. Being seen is what this is about. In a public space with other professional artists whose work you looked at with wide eyes just a few years ago.

The prizes can wait. The journey is what this is about. And it is an exciting, incredible one.