Just me, playing with my Virginia Woolf Portrait on the book cover. Dreaming.
Two mornings. Same studio.
The first: I walk in with the list already running in my head. Three orders to ship. The half-finished marsh painting needs to be photographed before the light changes. A licensing inquiry has been sitting in my inbox since Tuesday; there is varnishing, scanning and more. All awaiting. I pick up the brush with all of this humming somewhere behind my eyes, and I paint somewhat efficiently. I complete things, I deliver. The painting that comes out is competent, sometimes even good — it fits the series, it will be easy to caption. When I leave that afternoon, something adjacent to satisfaction.
The second: no list. I make coffee (fat cream, a dab of brandy, yeah) and look at the paper for longer than is reasonable. Move some brushes around for no particular reason. The light on the water jar does something complicated, and I watch it. Eventually, I pick up a brush, and what happens in the next two hours surprises me — mind you, not always pleasantly. But always truthfully. When I leave, I feel scraped clean like someone was in that room who doesn't usually get out.
These are not the same person. The question that has been sitting with me lately is: which one is making the art?
My guy (yeah!), Byung-Chul Han, calls our era an achievement society.
“Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.”
―
The external boss has been replaced, not removed. We've internalized the market so completely that we arrive at the studio as our own bosses and employees at once. "The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited." The vendor herself doesn't need a taskmaster — she is the taskmaster. She enters the studio and immediately starts optimizing.
Have you optimized your happiness lately, darling?
Our person—she's not lazy, and she loves the work. She looks at the painting, and she's already looking past it; she's anticipating the photograph, the print, the caption, the series coherence. She is intelligent, adaptive, and chronically homeless in the creative space. Because the creative space requires one thing she cannot do: she cannot stop knowing what everything is for.
I want to tell you something important. To me. Hopefully, to you:
The creative self is not interested in product.
She is interested in something that's arriving from some quantum gods and aethers. Lispector and Didion both said: You don't write to say something, you write to find out what needs to be said. You cannot do this if you are also keeping one eye on the clock.
The problem isn't that both selves exist. They need to. The problem is contamination. Production logic leaks. One thought about whether the palette is on-brand and the witness (or the Muse) has left the room. The contamination happens fastest when I don't protect the threshold — when I open email before I open the studio, when I check what sold, when I look at what else has been made, by whom, why, and how. The witness requires conditions: don't bring the list inside.
Two hours. It can wait, can't it?
A friend asked what I was making a particular painting for. I didn't know yet. She found this strange. But she works at the bank. I have nothing against banks—thank goodness there are all kinds of people doing jobs some of us would not be able to. But my bank friend thinks via a utilitarian lens.
I couldn't explain that the not-knowing is precision, not irresponsibility. The paintings made without an imagined audience find exactly the right person later. And if not, so what?
Who you are when no one is buying: that is your actual creative identity.
The vendor can produce, and she is necessary. But only the witness can make something that wasn't there before. Via the Muse, without the system.
Protect her hours. Let her make the mess. Don't photograph it yet. Eat it with your eyes in love.
