I liked Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals, so I picked up this book about how various artists fund their creative lives. Like his previous book, it offers interesting glimpses into different artists’ lives and their attitudes toward money.
There is no single correct way to fund a creative life. Some people succeed by pursuing creative work on the side. Others need to devote themselves fully before they can make progress. And some people, without external constraints, end up wasting their time. Each of us has to find an arrangement that fits our personality and that we can live with.
Frugality helps as it provides more options. But for certain pursuits, such as professional sports and chess, age and timing also matter. I admire artists who give everything to creating art or mastering their craft. But a chaotic and uncertain life does not suit my temperament. So I chose to focus on building financial security first, before shifting more of my time toward hobbies in my late 30s and early 40s.
Overall, I think that choice has worked out well. The encouraging thing is that it is not too late to begin and improve at many artistic activities. And while I cannot compete in sports at a professional level, there are still enough opportunities to play with others. I can also enjoy simply practising on my own.
Excerpts:
This reader is someone powerfully drawn to a life in the arts and at the same time powerfully stumped by the difficulty of balancing those ambitions with the very real need to pay rent and put food in the fridge. Sure, there are some well-worn paths forward: Get a day job and do your creative work in your spare time. Go to graduate school and try to find a foothold in academia that encourages or at least tolerates your art-making practice. Pursue a sort-of-related career–journalism for writers, say, or graphic design for visual artists–and hope to channel your artistic impulses into this more financially secure profession. Find somewhere extremely affordable to live and get by on a little income as possible. Become a genius at applying for–and winning–grants, fellowships, residencies, retreats, contests, and other funding opportunities. Coax money out of your parents, acquire a patron, or attract a life partner who’s willing to subsidise your art. Or–most elusive of all–make your art pay, by tailoring it to the market place or somehow forcing the culture to come to you.
The dumb truth is that there is no cultural production without financial supports. It is simply not possible to become an accomplished painter or musician or novelist or pet without spending a lot of time experimenting, making false starts, starting over, starting over again, absorbing criticism, thinking, reading, talking, and mooning about the house aimlessly. All this time has to be purchased, one way or another.
Leonard [Virginia Woolf’s husband] writes: “Neither of us ever took a day’s holiday unless we were too ill to work or unless we went away on a regular and, as it were, authorised holiday. We should have felt it was not merely wrong but unpleasant not to work every morning for seven days a week and for about eleven months a year. Every morning, therefore, at about 9.30 after breakfast each of us, as if moved by a law of unquestioned nature, went off and “worked” until lunch at 1. It is surprising how much one can produce in a year, whether of buns or books or pots or pictures, if one works hard and professionally for three and a half hours every day for 330 days.
According to a personal secretary employed by the Ives family for a time, “Mr. Ives would come home from a strenuous day in the insurance business, have his meal, and then go [to] the piano and forget all about time until the wee small hours. He would be completely absorbed in his music.”
In truth, it’s not so easy to make one version of your art just for money and then pivot to the other version, the one you make without worrying about money and maybe even in defiance of it. Trying to do both things at once may prevent you from doing either of them well. And if you succeed at one, the world may not let you pivot to the other.
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