Matthew Odam posted an article a couple weeks ago at Austin360.com and there's nothing too new in it, except this:
Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article recently about how we relate precocity to genius and talked about the idea that people who come to their creative greatness later in life come to it through a form of open-ended exploration, versus the conceptual thinking of young geniuses like Picasso. I wonder how you relate to both of those ideas — that of precocity and genius and the different ways of finding your voice as an artist, and if you ever felt you might not reach your potential.
I really, really wanted to be a wunderkind. I had that word in my head and wanted it to happen.
At what age?
Oh, God, 9? [Laughter] Seriously. The idea of that was something in my head that just thrilled me. As it didn't happen, and then I moved farther and farther away from it, it started to seem less important to me, and I kinda gave it away… . If I had become successful or well-known when I was in my early 20s, I probably would be a really different person doing really different stuff and it might have been lesser. I don't know. I had a lot of life experiences that put me in the world of people who were struggling. When I worked in TV, I worked with people who were very successful at an early age. And you don't know which came first, the chicken or the egg, but there's a difference in the way they treat the people they work with. Not with all of them, but there's sometimes a quality of being very, very spoiled and being very, very sort of out of touch with people.
The conceptual thing confuses me because I feel like my work is conceptual. But I do also want to use that as a framework for being expansive and exploring emotions and ideas and moving closer to some sort of realization of a truth. I read this thing where Isadora Duncan said, 'I've strived my whole life to make one authentic gesture.' And I love that idea and I love the idea of how hard that is. (Source)
The Gladwell piece is here, and there's a similar thing here.
