Hornby Island is full of people who come here to live in their heads -- when not driving each other nuts. Lots of artists, retired radio producers, activists, many of them shockingly on in years. It is not uncommon to meet residents in their 80s who walk five miles a day, swim in the ocean year round ("except when the herring are spawning") and continue to explore new relationships ("it was sexual at first, but it turned out they really enjoy each other's company").
One artist I spoke with came to the island almost fifty years ago. Because I know a bit about him, I know that he lives with a frugality consistent with his aesthetic, his politics. He has managed on the same $12,000-a-year he budgeted for himself in the mid-1970s, an exercise that owes as much to subtracting himself from a consumer society as it does to feeding on the ever-widening spaces made available through the absence of that which he can live without.
If an artist lives long enough, pays attention to what is going on in the contemporary conversation, and makes that conversation a material, he or she will have their moment (in sales). The artist of which I speak had such a moment a few years ago, and the result, he says, "is a nightmare that has me waking up scared of this money, as if it were a great dollar-feathered bird at the end of the bed, waiting to eat my feet off, keep me in the studio making more of it."
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