Life Must Bend Around You
After my recent article You Could Drop Me Anywhere, a thoughtful subscriber left a comment suggesting that I had made the artist’s path sound far too simple.
She described her own journey over fifty years of making art.
Bartending. Puppeteering. Putting herself through art school. Earning a BFA. Then an MFA. Selling large paintings that briefly funded work toward a PhD in philosophy of art until the money ran out.
Teaching full time.
Maintaining a full-time studio practice after school, evenings, and weekends.
Building a life where employment allowed the freedom to make work independent of market demands.
She reminded me that many artists, particularly women raising families, do not simply arrange life around art in any easy or obvious way. And she was absolutely right.
I realized afterward that perhaps I had not expressed myself clearly enough. When I say the artist’s path is simple, I am not saying it is easy. I am saying the underlying principle is simple.
Simple and easy are two entirely different things.
The simple part is deciding.
You accept that this is what you are. You stop negotiating with yourself about it. You stop imagining alternate lives. You stop treating your deepest nature as optional. From that moment forward, life begins organizing itself around that central fact. Or perhaps more accurately, you begin bending life to organize itself around that central fact.
That process can be extraordinarily difficult.
I know this firsthand.
I raised two stepchildren, seven foster children, and three of my own children while building my life in the studio around side hustles of all sorts. But it always is build around supporting my studio practice. There were years I woke up every morning at four o’clock because that was the only quiet time available before everyone else woke up. There were years I worked late into the night after the house was asleep. There were years of poverty so severe that I genuinely wondered how I would pay rent or house payment or medical bills or keep the utilities running through the winter sometimes living in one room of the house with a space heater. There were years of exhaustion. Distraction. Failure. Moments when I was not fully present for those around me. Moments I regretted.
And like many artists, I often went to sleep hoping simply that I had done no harm that day and did, not the best, but the best I was capable of and resolving to do better tomorrow.
So no.
I am not speaking from a place of comfort. I am speaking from decades of adaptation.
When people hear me say that artists should organize life around their work, sometimes they imagine I am talking about ideal circumstances.
I am not.
I am talking about orientation.
There are artists who bend themselves entirely around life. Then there are artists who slowly insist that life itself bends around the continuation of the work.
This does not mean selfishness. It does not mean neglecting responsibility. It means refusing to abandon your own nature. It means understanding that sidelining what you fundamentally are is not a sustainable strategy for living. Then you are just a ghost of yourself.
One way or another, life and those around you must bend around you as much as you bend around life.
The circumstances will never be ideal. There will always be obligations. Children. Bills. Jobs. Relationships. Illness. Exhaustion. Disappointment. But that is everyone’s life. The world will never clear a perfect path for your creative life. So the work becomes learning how to make it simple. How to use your creativity to build your life around your creativity.
Not easy.
Simple.
You remove unnecessary complexity. You stop romanticizing struggle. You stop waiting for ideal conditions. You build systems. You protect time. You wake earlier. You need less. You learn to make the process stupid simple.
Because in the end, the artist is not someone who makes art when conditions allow. The artist is the person who quietly keeps rearranging conditions so the work can continue.
Courage matters. Persistence matters. Determination matters. Authenticity matters.
But underneath all of those is something even deeper.
Purposeful relentlessness.
The willingness to keep bending reality until there is enough space for the work you are here to do.
It is simple.
I never said it was easy.
I just subscribed to your newsletter. Here's why. I resonate with your collages. I am astounded by your writing productivity. I deeply respect and value the creative process. I want to support your work, your art, your communication about art, your teaching and mentorship. Thank you for your devotion to the work.
We do what we can do the way it can or supposed to be done according to our needs and even our desires. I had to adapt once I got divorced and had to downsize and adjust to a new life going from housewife/stay at home mother an artist with a show every other year to working fulltime, doing minimal art, maybe a group show here and there until there were no more shows. By choice I stopped doing art but told myself I will never stop being an artist. Once I was retired and didn't have to work for anyone half my age, I began doing my art again. Still no gallery but I'm doing, creating, loving every minute of it and feeling fulfilled. I had worried if I still 'got it' after the years of not producing and found out I'm even better........better skilled, better ideas, and so in love with the work. I still got it....yes, it laid dormant in me for a long while but when nourished, it came back a thousand-fold like the desert blooming after the rains finally came.