Building a Productive Creative Process
The most important task you have, if you want to become or stay a productive creative, is to build a process that brings new works to life regularly. And it’s not as easy as you think. First, you have to build a life that makes art possible before your art makes a living from it possible (maybe it is a good idea to read this sentence again). When you have done this, you will recognize that many of the romantic clichés of the life of an artist are… false.
Dispelling the Romantic Myths
Seldom do you find yourself waking up in the middle of the day, throwing the curtain away, while your nude muse next to you is laughing, “Oh, this is so cold here, come back,” and you—bursting with energy and inspiration —jump to your easel and paint her beautiful existence in a fast rush of excitement, posting a work-in-progress shot on Instagram, selling this half-finished thing immediately to one of your 500k followers before you jump back to your bed, order food, and enjoy the rest of your “working” day.
The Reality of the Artistic Grind
Much more often, you will search through dirty, squeezed-out paint tubes in hope that you will find a good chunk of your favorite color. Which you won’t find. But this doesn’t matter because the painting session that you wanted to start gets interrupted by the thought that you haven’t sent out your work for this group exhibition next week. So you lay down the brushes, collect the work from different corners of your studio, look at them, and recognize that you haven’t varnished the damn paintings yet. That you have not photographed them comes to your mind when you have already packed them carefully with the package material you have left over from different Amazon orders. I could go on and on with this kind of work nobody sees from the outside.
Protecting Your Creative Hours
But these necessary tasks make the time when you sit down (or healthier: stand, maybe even move around) and create much more valuable. These “creative” hours must be protected with good organization and, in the best case, with great people who do things for you that you do not need to do personally.
Then, when you are in the zone, the holy creative part of your day, where all the magic happens, you realize another thing: Boy, this is work too. How does this come? I do not understand….
When the artistic process becomes timewise a crucial part of your life, you will understand that it is a daily grind that requires (ATTENTION, now there are coming three ugly words for today’s working culture) discipline, patience and resilience.
The Marathon of Artistry
We are definitely doing an ultra-marathon here, and sprinting is only helpful for a few days before a deadline. You have to wrap your head around the idea that good works do not fall from the sky (suggesting that your art process involves more than copying and pasting the right prompts of other people together). They are made in a labor-intensive and time-consuming process.
“The writer [or painter, musician, and so on] is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time and paid for in blood.”
– Steven Pressfield
So, progress comes hard, perfection will not be achieved, unexpected challenges hunt you, and failures are normal. You better get a thick skin and a helmet. Try to see everything as an opportunity to learn (because it is), make use of the “good enough” standard for things that are less important, find ways to make your process enjoyable (for example, nice food in the breaks, music, company of other artists), and give yourself a mantra that you can rely on when you feel exhausted.
A Mantra for the Journey
I adopted the following phrase from Jeffrey Watts:
“It is just another day in the trenches.”
This is so simple and beautiful (and speaks to my interest in World Wars I, II, and III). It says that today is not a special day. There is just work to do. It will be rough and dirty, but hey, we have killed some rats for the soup, the enemy’s shells exploding over our heads are a bit quieter than yesterday, and I can feel my little frozen toe again? Amazing!
When the work is done, you can go home.
Start caring about your artistic process; you will spend the most time here. And do not forget that while the artworks go to the people, the process is the gift you get from doing your art.
