Today is my first day back in my studio after being on a seven week collage expedition. I exceeded my goal of making three collages on average a day for the whole forty-nine days I was gone.
Now to sort it all out and start making the next year’s worth of paintings!
Here is a new article that follows the last couple of related articles.
Creativity Itself is Abundance.
Journal Entry: Tuesday, June 23, 2026
It is perhaps the purest form of abundance we have access to. It arrives endlessly. It renews itself daily. It is generative by nature. It asks nothing from us except attention, willingness, and participation. For the artist, creativity is the spring from which everything flows. It is the source itself.
Money is something else entirely.
Fame is something else entirely.
These belong to a secondary realm downstream from the creative act. They are social artifacts generated by collective human systems of exchange, valuation, commerce, reputation, and desire. They are reactions created by others around the objects we make. They do not originate from us in the same way creativity does.
An artist may spend years producing extraordinary work in obscurity while another may accidentally find themselves surrounded by attention and financial success. Neither condition tells us anything meaningful about the depth or quality of the creative source itself.
Poverty and wealth exist downstream.
Obscurity and fame exist downstream.
The spring remains upstream.
The problem begins when the artist turns around and begins walking downstream in search of the source. This is the great confusion. When creativity becomes reduced to a strategy for obtaining money or recognition, the relationship to the work begins to distort. Anxiety enters. Calculation enters. Comparison enters. The work begins carrying burdens it was never meant to carry.
The artist starts asking dangerous questions.
Will this sell?
Will people like this?
How do I make something more marketable?
What is popular right now?
What kind of work gets attention?
These questions slowly replace the more essential question.
What is trying to emerge through me?
The artist who mistakes creativity for a vehicle toward fame or financial security eventually begins negotiating against their own source. They begin abandoning the mysterious territory where genuine discovery happens and instead start manufacturing outcomes designed to satisfy external systems.
This often leads to creative exhaustion.
The tragedy is not failure in the marketplace.
The tragedy is losing contact with the wellspring itself.
This does not mean money is unimportant.
This does not mean recognition has no place.
The world of exchange matters. Artists live in the practical world and must navigate practical concerns. But we must understand hierarchy.
Creativity comes first.
Always.
The work comes first.
The conversation between the artist and the source must remain protected.
Money, sales, collectors, galleries, institutions, followers, reputation, praise, criticism, obscurity, all of these are weather patterns forming downstream around the work after it leaves our hands.
We do not control the weather.
We tend the spring.
The healthiest artist understands that their true wealth has very little to do with income. Their wealth is found in remaining connected to an inexhaustible source of generative possibility. Every day they can enter the studio and discover something new. Every day they can continue the conversation.
That is abundance.
The rest is negotiation.
The world may reward the work generously.
The world may ignore it entirely.
But the artist who remains connected to the source itself never truly becomes poor.
Because the source remains endless.
And it is from that endless place that all meaningful work enters the world.
This phrase, “Creativity is Abundance “ is not only true, it uplifts the spirit whether we feel the tug of limitations or the misery of world politics. Thank you this gift to lighten my heart.
Another great article of truth for artists to keep in mind. I save these inspirational posts on my phone, to refer to when I need a lift. Thank you Cecil, and keep going. Your voice is important for artists to hear.