The Artist's Way (24 page)

Bottom Line

5. Cherishing:

CHECK-IN

I
AM AN ARTIST
. As an artist, I may need a different mix of stability and flow from other people. I may find that a nine-to-five job steadies me and leaves me freer to create. Or I may find that a nine-to-five drains me of energy and leaves me unable to create. I must experiment with what works for me.

An artist's cash flow is typically erratic. No law says we must be broke all the time, but the odds are good we may be broke some of the time. Good work will sometimes not sell. People will buy but not pay promptly. The market may be rotten even when the work is great. I cannot control these factors. Being true to the inner artist often results in work that sells—but not always. I have to free myself from determining my value and the value of my work by my work's market value.

The idea that money validates my credibility is very hard to shake. If money determines real art, then Gauguin was a charlatan. As an artist, I may never have a home that looks like
Town
and
Country
—or I may. On the other hand, I may have a book of poems, a song, a piece of performance art, a film.

I must learn that as an artist my credibility lies with me,
God, and my work. In other words, if I have a poem to write, I need to write that poem—whether it will sell or not.

I need to create what wants to be created. I cannot plan a career to unfold in a sensible direction dictated by cash flow and marketing strategies. Those things are fine; but too much attention to them can stifle the child within, who gets scared and angered when continually put off. Children, as we all know, do not deal well with “Later. Not now.”

Since my artist is a child, the natural child within, I must make some concessions to its sense of timing.
Some
concessions does not mean total irresponsibility. What it means is letting the artist have quality time, knowing that if I let it do what it wants to it will cooperate with me in doing what I need to do.

Sometimes I will write badly, draw badly, paint badly, perform badly. I have a right to do that to get to the other side. Creativity is its own reward.

As an artist, I must be very careful to surround myself with people who nurture my artist—not people who try to overly domesticate it for my own good. Certain friendships will kick off my artistic imagination and others will deaden it.

I may be a good cook, a rotten housekeeper, and a strong artist. I am messy, disorganized except as pertains to writing, a demon for creative detail, and not real interested in details like polished shoes and floors.

To a large degree my life is my art, and when it gets dull, so does my work. As an artist, I may poke into what other people think of as dead ends: a punk band that I mysteriously fall for, a piece of gospel music that hooks my inner ear, a piece of red silk I just like and add to a nice outfit, thereby “ruining it.”

As an artist, I may frizz my hair or wear weird clothes. I may spend too much money on perfume in a pretty blue bottle even though the perfume stinks because the bottle lets me write about Paris in the thirties.

As an artist, I write whether I think it's any good or not. I shoot movies other people may hate. I sketch bad sketches to say, “I was in this room. I was happy. It was May and I was meeting somebody I wanted to meet.”

As an artist, my self-respect comes from doing the work. One performance at a time, one gig at a time, one painting at a
time. Two and a half years to make one 90-minute piece of film. Five drafts of one play. Two years working on a musical. Throughout it all, daily, I show up at the morning pages and I write about my ugly curtains, my rotten haircut, my delight in the way the light hit the trees on the morning run.

As an artist, I do not need to be rich but I do need to be richly supported. I cannot allow my emotional and intellectual life to stagnate or the work will show it. My life will show it. My temperament will show it. If I don't create, I get crabby.

As an artist, I can literally die from boredom. I kill myself when I fail to nurture my artist child because I am acting like somebody else's idea of an adult. The more I nurture my artist child, the more adult I am able to appear. Spoiling my artist means it will let me type a business letter. Ignoring my artist means a grinding depression.

There is a connection between self-nurturing and self-respect. If I allow myself to be bullied and cowed by other people's urges for me to be more normal or more nice, I sell myself out. They may like me better, feel more comfortable with my more conventional appearance or behavior, but I will hate myself. Hating myself, I may lash out at myself and others.

If I sabotage my artist, I can well expect an eating binge, a sex binge, a temper binge. Check the relationship between these behaviors for yourself. When we are not creating, artists are not always very normal or very nice—to ourselves or to others.

Creativity is oxygen for our souls. Cutting off our creativity makes us savage. We react like we are being choked. There is a real rage that surfaces when we are interfered with on a level that involves picking lint off of us and fixing us up. When well-meaning parents and friends push marriage or nine-to-five or anything on us that doesn't evolve in a way that allows for our art to continue, we will react as if we are fighting for our lives—we are.

To be an artist is to recognize the particular. To appreciate the peculiar. To allow a sense of play in your relationship to accepted standards. To ask the question “Why?” To be an artist is to risk admitting that much of what is money, property, and prestige strikes you as just a little silly.

To be an artist is to acknowledge the astonishing. It is to allow the wrong piece in a room if we like it. It is to hang on to a weird coat that makes us happy. It is to not keep trying to be something that we aren't.

If you are happier writing than not writing, painting than not painting, singing than not singing, acting than not acting, directing than not directing, for God's sake (and I mean that literally) let yourself do it.

To kill your dreams because they are irresponsible is to be irresponsible to yourself. Credibility lies with you and God—not with a vote of your friends and acquaintances.

The creator made us creative. Our creativity is our gift
from
God. Our use of it is our gift
to
God. Accepting this bargain is the beginning of true self-acceptance.

Creativity is a spiritual practice. It is not something that can be perfected, finished, and set aside. It is my experience that we reach plateaus of creative attainment only to have a certain restlessness set in. Yes, we are successful. Yes, we have made it, but …

In other words, just when we get there,
there
disappears. Dissatisfied with our accomplishments, however lofty, we are once again confronted with our creative self and its hungers. The questions we have just laid to rest now rear their heads again: what are we going to do …
now?

This unfinished quality, this restless appetite for further exploration, tests us. We are asked to expand in order that we not contract. Evading this commitment—an evasion that tempts us all—leads straight to stagnation, discontent, spiritual discomfort. “Can't I rest?” we wonder. In a word, the answer is no.

As artists, we are spiritual sharks. The ruthless truth is that if we don't keep moving, we sink to the bottom and die. The choice is very simple: we can insist on resting on our laurels, or we can begin anew. The stringent requirement of a sustained creative life is the humility to start again, to begin anew.

It is this willingness to once more be a beginner that dis
tinguishes a creative career. A friend of mine, a master in his field, finds himself uncomfortably committed years in advance of his availability. He is in an enviable position on a business level, but he finds it increasingly perilous to his artistic health. When the wheel turns and the project committed to three years ago must be executed, can he do it with imagination and his initial enthusiasm? The honest answer is often an uncomfortable
no.
And so, at great financial cost, he has begun cutting back his future commitments, investing in the riskier but more rewarding gain of artistic integrity.

Not all of us, always, can muster such creative courage in the face of fiscal temptation, but we can try. We can at least be willing. As artists, we are travelers. Too heavily encumbered by our worldly dignity, too invested in our stations and positions, we are unable to yield to our spiritual leadings. We insist on a straight and narrow when the Artist's Way is a spiral path. Invested in the outer trappings of a career, we can place that investment above our inner guidance. Deciding to play by the numbers, we lose our commitment to counting ourselves and our own goals worthy.

Creativity is not a business, although it may generate much business. An artist cannot replicate a prior success indefinitely. Those who attempt to work too long with formula, even their own formula, eventually leach themselves of their creative truths. Embedded as we often are in the business milieu of our art, it is tempting to guarantee what we cannot deliver: good work that duplicates the good work that has gone before.

Successful movies generate a business demand for sequels. Successful books generate a demand for further, similar books. Painters pass through popular periods in their work and may be urged to linger there. For potters, composers, choreographers, the problem is the same. As artists, we are asked to repeat ourselves and expand on the market we have built. Sometimes this is possible for us. Other times it's not.

As a successful artist, the trick is to not mortgage the future too heavily. If the house in the Hamptons costs two years of creative misery cranking out a promised project just for cash, that house is an expensive luxury.

This is not to say that editors should stop planning seasons or that studios should scuttle their business bottom line. It
is
to say that the many creatives laboring in fiscal settings should remember to commit themselves not only to projects that smack of the sure thing but also to those riskier projects that call to their creative souls. You don't need to overturn a successful career in order to find creative fulfillment. It
is
necessary to overturn each day's schedule slightly to allow for those small adjustments in daily trajectory that, over the long haul, alter the course and the satisfactions of our careers.

This means writing your morning pages. Taking your artist date. “But I run a studio,” you say—or whatever other thing it is you must do. “People depend on me.” I say, all the more reason to depend on yourself and protect your own creativity.

If we ignore our inner commitment, the cost rapidly becomes apparent in the outer world. A certain lackluster tone, a rote inevitability, evicts creative excitement from our lives and, eventually, our finances. Attempting to insure our finances by playing it safe, we lose our cutting edge. As the promised projects diverge further and further from our inner leanings, a certain deep artistic weariness sets in. We must summon our enthusiasm at gunpoint instead of reveling in each day's creative task.

Artists can and do responsibly meet the demands of their business partnerships. What is more difficult and more critical is for us as artists to continue to meet the inner demand of our own artistic growth. In short, as success comes to us, we must be vigilant. Any success postulated on a permanent artistic plateau dooms us, and it, to failure.