Live Like an Artist – The Work of Art
How will you live like an artist today? This is the question I keep asking myself and I try to throw it out there into the wilderness too.
We all know the answers, but we need to hear them again and again. We need to listen to the work, our life’s work, most of all, because it tells us what we’re required to do.
I’ve written a few of these posts on living like an artist by now, but maybe this whole blog leans toward demonstrating how to live like an artist. The over and over of process. The repetitions, the ego, the lack of ego, the doubt, the joy, the humility, the humiliations! Living as a civilian, as I've pointed out in a book called The Flower Can Always Be Changing, is at some point no longer an option.
Let’s start with a poem to set the tone:
Better is Better Than Not Better
by Elaine Equi
Grateful today
for small things:
getting paid
and paying bills,
my new orange
ring-of-Saturn
dinner plates,
spaghetti,
wine,
the ability
to praise coherently
the books I love.
{source}
And isn’t that just a gift? To be able to praise coherently the books you love? Part of the art-life, too.
I think we’re all always looking for models — how to be, and wondering, how did this or that person manage to live as an artist? Often, we’re looking at the monetary part of things, figuring out how we, too, can make a go of it. We’re seeing what was given up (haircuts, friends, healthcare, peace of mind — I could go on) and what was gained. (We add to the beauty and potentially philosophical and ethical thought of the world rather than detract from it. Our days are richer thanks to our preoccupations. We are regularly astonished and amazed and in awe, etc).
A book I’ve been drawing inspiration from is The Work of Art by Adam Moss. There are 43 interviews with artists, choreographers, writers, cartoonists, etc. I’ve tended to read just one of the entries, replete with illustrations of process and art, per evening. Some nights, I’ve just flipped through the book and looked at the photographs of the work, the process, the mess, the thinking things through made visible. Maybe the biggest take-away is that there is no formula, no “secret.” (Unless you count the work itself, the obsessive working).
In the afterword, Moss says, “Art has a before and an after. The before is the training — the acquisition of skills, the assumption of habits. The after is the practical activity of putting finger to key, palm to clay, and going to town.”
And then:
“But there is also an in-between. It’s the mysterious part. Some describe that mystery as magical, otherworldly. Others view it as their subconscious churning. It doesn’t matter. All artists are mystics at heart, and they’re talking about the same thing — and that thing is what they can’t really talk about, because it cannot be put into language.”
One feels looking at all the images in the book, the sketches, the scribbles, the scratchings, the notes, that therein lies the magic. Just the obsessive working as a thing. And, I love that. I love looking at the photos. And. I also love the interviews, interspersed with commentary, intros, and etc. The subtitle of the book is, “how something comes from nothing” and I can just imagine the massive task it would have been to assemble all this material into a work of art unto itself for all of us to peruse. It’s really delightful, and wonderful, and a gift of a tome. It’s obviously super interesting to creative types, but I think anyone would enjoy this glimpse into all these many artistic lives. Inspiration on every page.
As many of us have been, and if you’ve been in the creativity game for most of your life, odds are you’ll have a shelf devoted to books like Big Magic, and Bird by Bird, and The Writing Life etc. We’ve got books on craft, and books on how to comport oneself at one’s book launch. These books have been indispensable, for sure! But I really didn’t know if I needed any more of them. Still, I succumbed and got the massive best seller by Rick Rubin, the Creative Act: A Way of Being. I’m glad I did.
A few quotations for you:
“We are dealing in a magic realm.
Nobody knows why or how it works.”
“Being an artist means to be continually asking, “How can it be better?” whatever it is. It may be your art and it may be your life.”
“However you frame yourself as an artist the frame is too small.”
I appreciate how in the second quotation above, it’s understood that your life and your art work in tandem. I appreciate the guidance to not frame yourself too small.
I feel like when you are based in a smaller less “cool” locale, things are trickier in some ways. Sure process is same but support is different. And that’s fine. Sometimes it can be freeing to create off the beaten path. But it’s not without challenges. And maybe that’s why books like the two I’ve mentioned today are useful, too — if we can think of books and their writers as ‘unmet friends’ it can feel like we’re getting some encouragement from someone who gets us.
I find it very helpful and splendidly delightful to hear, after all these years writing, and making stuff, that “nobody knows why or how it works.” Doesn’t matter where you’re doing the making or what you’re making, it’s all mystery, it’s all a magic trick. But it’s also doggedness, work, scary discipline, obsession, trying and trying and trying and freaking trying. Which of course we know, but hearing it does the heart good.
A note on the photographs: the web was in my backyard this week and I can’t see a spiderweb without thinking about this:
“The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.”
―Louise Bourgeois
