The Artist's Way
Reader Question
A couple of questions from A.
Sometime this past fall I had the thought “I want to be an artist.” I told my partner this the other day and he said something like “Who says you’re not?” Well, I say I’m not (yet).
Julia Cameron (author of The Artist’s Way) says that everyone is an artist. I know that if I say I’m an artist, I am. But what I feel like is a person whose job (thankfully) involves some creativity, and someone who has always had creative pursuits of some kind. So maybe the self-edited version of “I want to be an artist” is “I want to feel like an artist.”
The next question, asked by my partner but also pondered by me, is “What is an artist?” Which gets at the difference (to me) between my creative activities and art.
I see art as something created as an expression of something experienced by the artist—an answer to a question, a feeling, a story they want to tell … And what I have been doing is making things which are (usually) useful, doing it well, and making them look nice.
So, my bigger question is: How do I make the shift in my creative practice from making attractive, useful things to expressing something through my work?
I have a feeling the main answer to any of my current questions is: make time and practice. And I’m not looking for a way around that. But I am perpetually decision-fatigued and can easily sit at my worktable and think “What should I do?” until it’s time to make dinner. I know that part of this for me is that I want to get better at my art, and that means practice and repetition—which means I don’t want to be all over the place with a medium or subject. So, smaller question: How am I supposed to decide what to work on?
My other question isn’t exactly a question but more a statement of fear. I am afraid that I will not find my voice. And again, maybe I just need to make time and make art and it will reveal itself. Or maybe it’s there and I simply need to pull back a curtain to see it.
Within your submission are your answers, A. But maybe my response here can help you hold them a little more effortlessly.
You’ve shared a bunch of pieces that feel important to acknowledge—that everyone is an artist and you don’t yet feel like one, that defining what an artist is and does is helpful for you, and that you fear that you may not find your voice on the other side of all this effort. I suspect this last one explains why you are seeking such certainty as you enter into this new phase of making.
You are in what I would call “figure it out” mode.