Live Like an Artist – What is Your Art Story?
What even is an artist? a writer? a creative? Let’s consider the following quotation by Hélène Cixous:
“I call “poet” any writer, philosopher, author of plays, dreamer, producer of dreams, who uses life as a time of “approaching.””
I feel fortunate that I came across this definition of what a poet might be early on in my writing career. It’s expansive; it’s spacious. We’re all in this art dream together, using life as a time of approaching.
Advice for proceeding in the creative life? Thomas Merton said this in an essay titled, “Writing as a Spiritual Calling”: “I would say that there is one basic idea that should be kept in mind in all the changes we make in life, whether of career or anything else. We should decide not in view of better pay, higher rank, “getting ahead,” but in view of becoming more real, entering more authentically into direct contact with life, living more as a free and mature human person, able to give myself more to others, able to understand myself and the world better.” He then ends by saying, “I hope these few notes may be of some use.” Same Thomas Merton, same.
I ended my last post in this category by asking you to take a minute and ask yourself, What. Is. Your. (Art). Story. (Now)?
I think most of us in the arts have the experience of applying for a grant and having to describe a project. Even if (and statistically that’s most of the time) we don’t get that grant, the process is good because we’ve had to solidify some goals. We’ve created a thesis statement and we imagine an outcome. We have a document and mission statement to refer back to when we feel like we’ve lost our way or when we’ve lost faith or become fatigued or downtrodden or even depressed.
Perhaps you are not the same person from four years ago. The pandemic was hard on us! I think we usually do become new people every few years anyway, but this really accelerated things for a lot of us! I think the reason to sit down and create a one page document for your art direction/process lies in this quotation:
“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, to retain it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.”
— Salman Rushdie
So maybe you’ve told yourself what your art story is before. How is it different now? What do you want to accomplish through your art? How will you utter your story differently? What words are now pertinent to you?
There is another quotation from the beloved book What’s the Story by Anne Bogart by Richard Rorty, who says, “A talent for speaking differently, rather for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.”
I’ve been telling my art story for over a decade on this blog and others. When I decided to make new categories on this blog, I wanted them to reflect my ‘mission statement.’ And this is: that every day beauty enriches our lives and that we are all required to make something beautiful. So when I share something, I’m asking myself if it reflects the fact that I’m living each day as an artist. I want to continue to figure out how art and poetry and literature and music can be a balm and repair our souls. This is how I came up with my four new categories: Mixtape, Repair Shop, Live Like an Artist, and Poetry Club. I’ve been doing this all along, but I want to bring it all back to these four possibilities in this space.
Humans are natural storytellers, we connect through stories. This isn’t news. But I think we often hide from our stories, or don’t bring them forward in clear ways. I like to give myself permission to do this by remembering Bogart saying, “Speaking a story can be an act of letting in light.” And to remember too that telling our story is a basic human right, as she also notes. She quotes the filmmaker Sarah Polley, “Telling stories is our way of coping, a way out of creating shape out of a mess. It binds everyone together.”
Life is a big enough mess. How can you bring clarity to your story?
I’m not a marketer, but I’ve been using words and pictures, often in combination, to tell stories whether in poetry, essays, or novels for let’s go with 30 years. Recently, I’ve been helping my partner tell his story on Instagram. It’s going to evolve! Because he’s always growing and changing as an artist. But at the beginning of the pandemic, he realized that his main message was that Art Helps, Beauty Matters, Flowers Help. And we built on his ideas from there.
When you keep tying your posts and your work back to what your message is, one that is truly authentic to you and your work practice, then a clarity builds around that.
So this is just one way of doing things, of course. But I’m hoping this might just spark some ideas for how you want to present yourself as an artist / writer / creative. My advice is to boil it down to something simple and super clear and catchy! You can expand from there, but clarity and creativity really is key. Have fun, laugh at yourself! Seriously, do! So important. For example, we started doing reels of painting turnarounds almost as a lark. Because it seemed like something the young kids were doing. But so far, this reel by Rob, for example has nearly a million views? And it was just something we were goofing around with. Moral of the story, have fun, keep it simple, keep your message clear. (The song I paired it with is “Thing of Beauty”).
Let me know in the comments if this is helpful for you or if it sparked some ideas. Thanks for sharing etc. etc.