Stories of artists’ lives often paint them as having been artists from infancy. Their parents say they were never without a pencil to scribble with as soon as they could hold one, whether they grew up to be fine artists, illustrators, designers, or writers. It is one of the most enviable qualities in a human, surely, that they knew what they wanted to do with their lives, what they wanted to ‘be’, from a young age. They had the maximum number of years possible in which to pursue and perfect their desires.
All of this is very off-putting to the rest of us.
You never really hear about people who ran through a host of decades without ever picking up a brush or touching a typewriter. Oh, there’s the occasional Mary Wesley type, who gets their first bestseller at 70-odd years of age, a source of hope to late bloomers everywhere. But when you get to know a little about these rare birds, you discover they began a neighborhood newspaper, complete with accomplished cartoons, at seven; were the leading literary light in their junior high school; won the County Art Fair at sixteen; have been writing daily, or drawing, or sculpting, throughout their lives, if only “for themselves”.
It was this body of myths and legends that stopped me — that I allowed to stop me — from daring to call myself an artist. I had mere skirmishes with the creative. I danced through my childhood, acted through my teens, cross-stitched cushions and crafted papier mâché bowls in my twenties, and drew several intriguing pencil sketches in my thirties while off my head on painkillers following knee surgery.
Now and then I’d read about some lawyer like me, who quit the law to become a writer of something other than legal journal articles read by three other people, skimmed by seven, and critiqued by twelve. She would get up at 5:30 every morning, drink green tea, go for a seven mile run, tend her garden, eat an apple and a slice of homemade sourdough bread, then settle down to hammer out a perfectly-formed chapter, before luncheon and siesta with her lover. I, lacking any such drive, discipline, focus, or infrastructure, would quell the artist hammering at my ribs to get out, and go back to constructing overlooked articles for obscure publications.
When I was young, I believed that artists were born, not made. Later, I came to think that perhaps artists were made, not born. Either way, I held myself up to these other histories, these impossibly rigid and wholesome daily schedules and self- controls, and felt too inadequate even to begin. I read a mountain of books about how to write without ever writing a word outside the workplace.
After a while, it became ... what would you call a combination of masturbation and procrastination, psychologically-speaking? Is there a word for that? There should be a word for that. I’ll bet German has one.
Then at forty-ish, something transformative occurred. After exploring American roadside attractions with a film camera, I knew that to be an artist is simply to be a child again, but with keener eyes. You don’t have to run daily to write. You just have to write. And write. Because you want to, for the sheer joy of it, even when joy is hard to come by and fear abundant.
You don’t have to be insane, or French, or a child savant, to be an artist. You just have to enjoy playing with paper, colour, and concepts, and trust the small voice inside that tells you when to stop. Connect the dots you see in the world, fill the empty spaces. Then, if you want, if you dare, throw what you’ve done at the walls of the world outside and see if anything sticks; walls that once you built inside, out of fear.
When I read that oak trees don’t start dropping acorns until they’re fifty-ish, it was a call to arms and a kick in the pants. In my 50s, I stopped working for other people, started house-sitting and pet-sitting full-time to keep my overheads down and, as an ‘artist in residence’, finally spent as many hours each day as possible writing and illustrating. Well, okay, some days. I’ve tried to do what Seneca suggests, and ‘count each day a new life’, each day as complete and perfectly imperfect as I can make it.
I do not make my own bread, lunch with a lover, or even keep a routine per se. I sometimes work until 3 and stagger up at 10. I live on a financial knife-edge. It’s kind of terrifying, actually. But I’m doing it at last. Working, creating, making. I got out of my own way somehow. The deaths of both my parents in 2020, 18 days apart, were the strongest reminder yet that if you have something yearning to scramble out of you, you must help it, while there’s still time.
Don’t die with your music still in you. Don’t die with your song left unsung.
So for yourself, yes. If you don’t it can give you all sorts of neuroses, addictions, and difficulties. As Carl Jung said, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’ But do it for others, too.
The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”
Alan Bennett, The History Boys
Writing and reading, image-making and viewing, create silvery threads that connect people through time and space. Someone, somewhere, will think, oh my god! Yes, that, I saw that too, felt that, thought that too. Does it mean anything to make these fleeting but jolting connections? It feels like it means something. ‘Only connect’, said E. M. Forster. ‘Live in fragments no longer.’ We yearn to connect, and we are all of us artists, if only we knew it, tributaries of a vast and formless ocean of reinvention, to make everything old, new again. Including ourselves, and our days.
Life itself is an art, each day you live can be a work of art, each person’s lifetime a work of art, whether Van Gogh’s Starry Sky or a black velvet Elvis painting. Each day, each life, is a collage. And what works in life works in creation, what works in creation works in life. There are no rules, no permissions. Only some simple truths:
That the certain knowledge of death works as a useful constraint on life in the same way a prompt, genre, or method provides impetus to make marks on a blank white surface (write a short story about a lost photograph, draw a sketch of something in your kitchen, take photos of plums. And tidy The Drawer of Doom at last, in case you get run over, before anyone else has to).
That negative space is as necessary in life as in a painting, to give form to content. So go ahead and take that nap or stare out that window.
That sharing is connection, and is exposing, and takes courage.
That attention is a form of love. Look at other people’s work too. Really look. Be grateful that they gave a little of their allotted time in this brief and fragile nook of spacetime to look at yours.
Do it. Today. Please. For us. Clear your inner pipes and let what is inside you flow freely, pour it out. The world needs it (and some might even pay you for it, may they be thrice-blessed). If we had any doubts before, pandemic lockdowns schooled us that creation is essential, even if creators are not unanimously viewed as essential workers.
If you will just get out of your own goddamned way about it, no matter your age, you can finally stop believing that other lives, ways of being, your daily duties, somehow have a power stronger than the artist within each of us. Thoughts become things.
I’m a believer in the power of knowledge and the ferocity of beauty, so from my point of view, your life is already artful — waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
* Toni Morrison
Thank you. I can relate to a lot of this as an author who totally forgot she loved writing stories for the best part of 30 years.
Thank you for writing this, Rachel. That phrase, and variations of it, is set to follow me to the end... "don't die with your music still inside you."