Barbara’s Studio

A: There are so many obstacles to art-making and countless reasons to just give up.  When you really think about it, it’s amazing that great art gets made at all.  So why do we do it?  For artists I believe it’s all about making our time on earth matter, about devotion to our innate gifts, and a deep love of our hard-fought creative process.  

I have been a full-time professional artist for 37 years.  How and why do successful artists persist?  It helps a lot to be stubborn!  We just keep digging in that much deeper.  Making art is a most noble and sacred calling – you know this if you are one of the called – and that’s what separates those of us who are in it for the long haul from the wimps, fakers, and hangers-on.  I say to my fellow artists who continue to work despite the endless challenges, we artists who continue to struggle every day for recognition of our gifts are true heroes! 

These words below by Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women, published in 2017, ring true for artists.  It’s good, even for me, to occasionally reread them and be reminded.

The obstacles faced by women who hoped to leave a mark on humankind have, through the millennium, varied in height but not in stubborn persistence.  And yet, a great many women have stubbornly ignored them. The desire to put words on a page or marks on a canvas was greater than the accrued social forces that told them they had no right to do so, that they were excluded by their gender from that priestly class called artist.  The reason, according to Western tradition, was as old as creation itself:  For many, God was the original artist and society had assigned its creator a gender – He.  The woman who dared to declare herself an artist in defiance of centuries of such unwavering belief required monstrous strength, to fight not for equal recognition and reward but for something at once more basic and vital:  her very life.  Her art was her life.  Without it, she was nothing.  Having no faith that society would broaden its views on artists by dethroning men and accommodating women, in 1928 [Virginia] Woolf offered her fellow writers and painters a formula for survival that allowed them to create, if not with acceptance, then at least unimpeded.  A woman artist, she said, needed but two possessions:  “money and a room of her own.”         

Furthermore, I think I persist because I do not believe in “big breaks.”  Big breaks may sometimes happen, but in my experience an artist’s life is made up of single-minded dedication, persistence, hard work, and lots of small breaks.  I recently finished reading “Failing Up: How to Take Risks, Aim Higher, and Never stop Learning” by Leslie Odom, Jr.   I like what he has to say to artists here:

The biggest break is the one you give yourself by choosing to believe in your wisdom, in what you love, and in the gifts you have to offer the waiting world.

Comments are welcome!