A Quote on Creative Lifestyle from Terry Allen
“I had never been around people that… To make a picture was dead serious. To write a story was for real. It wasn’t like something you did to get a grade or something like that. It was the first time that it really occurred to me that you could… that this could be a life. I think that’s… It wasn’t the idea of a vocation or a career. It wasn’t any of those kind of words. It was a choice of how you were going to conduct your life and once you stepped into that, everything you worried about or whatever got focused in because you really knew you didn’t have any money. You really knew what you had to do to get a space. You really knew what you needed to do to buy materials or find a keyboard or whatever... It was very real. Until then it was like just a cloud.”
I remember Terry Allen from when I was in college in the 1970’s as a kind of conceptual artist. I thought about him today because my son Zach just met Terry Allen’s son in Fort Worth, Texas and Zach wondered if I knew Terry Allen. I just said I knew of him but we never have met and he lives here in the area which I did not know. I also did not know that he was a song writer and has a band. I only know of him from art magazines and so forth mostly from a long time ago when he was a player in the contemporary art world. Maybe he still is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Allen_(artist)
Terry Allen grew up in Lubbock, Texas then eventually found his way into Chouinard Art Institute (later CalArts) where, after some time, discovered that his creative interests could be a lifetime activity. When I talk about making the commitment to your creative lifestyle it is very similar to what Allen is suggesting in the above statement from a video interview
Until you make the conscious choice, your mind is in a cloud, your decision to follow your creative trail is murky and insubstantial. Once you make the clear commitment however, everything becomes obvious as far as what you have to do because you are focused in on the idea. You have a direction and a goal. Until then you are not on the path, you are just drifting.
A creative lifestyle is both a choice and a commitment. As a choice, you have to recognize that you can chose to follow your creative life. But you have to come to the recognition that it is possible to spend your life an an artist and that it is important to you. If it is not important to you, if it is not an internal drive, then don’t waste you time, find that thing that is a driving subcurrent in your life.
Once you recognize this choice you then have to commit to it for it to become a lifestyle decision. This is where the clarity comes from, commitment made, you now can figure out what you have to do to make it real as a way of life.
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