The Bolivia cartoon artist Al-Azar is an example. He received a honorary distinction for his cartoon on the road construction project in the TIPNIS national park. And with reason, his cartoon shows a very sour picture, challenges people to think once more about the value of the park, the pacific indigenous march, the police brutality trying to repress it, the enormity of this historic event.
I should however add that in practice my own artistic work does not start with a specific theme or message, it is each time again a very specific and difficult evolution of inspiration, design, form and colours. It starts with a very rough idea, gets into a rather implicit process, with lots of intuition and feeling. OK, a certain message may be the result, it is however not the beginning, and let me be fair, there may be no message at all….. (although some may state that the under conscious may steer…. ).
Talking about the ‘part-time’ artist. I mentioned the psychiatrist-poet Vasalis. In a biography the poet answered the question why she did not publish anymore in the second part of her life: ‘It is impossible to combine being a psychiatrist and writing poetry. The psychiatric attitude is to open up toward the other, the poet however has to listen to him/herself (..): these are two contradictory processes.’ Gradually she had less time for her ‘self’, had to spend more time for ‘worldly issues’, like marriage, children, friends and patients. She demonstrates the tensions that may exist between different roles, between the artistic and the more reguklar realm.