For years I have been writing Morning Pages. The concept of Morning Pages comes from The Artists Way by Julia Cameron and involves writing 750 words of free form writing every morning. The idea is that you dump out what’s floating around in your head so that you can then approach your work freely without those distractions. It’s like a meditation and it teaches you a lot about yourself based on what comes up over and over again. It also gets your fingers, or pen, moving to help get over the initial fear of writing or creating.
After many years of doing them on paper, and finding it increasingly difficult as I type everything now and my hand cramps up with a pen after about five seconds, I discovered a free online tool which allows you to write and tells you when you’ve hit your target. 750 words is where I now do my daily writing. I suggest you check it out.
What’s interesting about the process of daily writing is what floats to the surface. While writing the other day about trying to juggle many conflicting demands, I came up with the following statement:
All I’m trying to do is pay the mortgage, save for old age and honour my creative spirit.
That seems to encapsulate exactly where I am as a 40 year old practicing artist. I am trying to balance the demands of earning a living and being a home owner with being a creative practicing artist. It’s where these two paths meet that Creative Entrepreneurship exists. If we are just making ‘art for arts sake’ without any ideas of how we are going to sell it or make money from it then we are simply treading the artists’ path. However, once you set about to earn a living off your art, then you are bring in a commercial/commerce path which you must tread. These two paths sometimes have conflicting needs or plans and the art is in balancing between both of them.
For me, it means teaching and writing as well as being an actor/singer. It hasn’t proved feasible for me to make a year-in year-out living as an actor/singer and so I have had to bring in other income streams in order to meet my middle class responsibilities of mortgage and retirement savings.
Some artists choose to forgo being encumbered with things like mortgages and pension plans. That’s their choice. It is possible to live in rental accommodation for your entire life, and there is no shame in that; however some people, myself included, would like to own our own homes. Part of it is that I take a great deal of solace from my home. By choosing to own my domicile, and make it my perfect home, actually feeds my creativity. But that comes at a price – a monthly commitment to pay the mortgage. It’s all balancing and in my books, compromise is not a negative word.
You could also choose to work until you drop dead. In some ways, it’s quite a noble path. Think of Louis Bourgeois who worked for all of her 99 years producing amazing vital art to the bitter end. There are loads of actors who worked until they dropped. It seems quite romantic to give your life to your art form.
But I have a problem with this plan.
They are the lucky ones. For every Louis Bourgeois, there are probably a 1000 little old ladies who were painter/artists and live out their old age in abject poverty as no one is interested in buying their art. Producing art is great but someone has to buy it and I’m not sure how much of a market there is for art produced by seniors who aren’t already famous.
If you’re not famous and in demand now, what’s the likelihood you are going to be in 50 years? If you are struggling to make a living from your art now, what makes you think it’s going to be any easier when you aren’t able to work the long hours you do now?
It’s harsh, but I’d like to think that every artist should have some money put away to grease the wheels when they are old.
Those of us who choose not to have children are going to need it even more. If you have children, you can guilt them into looking after you, but when you have no children you need to pay someone to wipe your nose and change your diaper. That kind of care doesn’t come cheap. The more dignity you want to have in old age, the more money you need saved to realise it.
So I’m not prepared to just gamble on the fact that I can work until I drop. I hope to work as an actor/singer/teacher/writer for as long as I can. Maybe I’ll even add some other things to the mix like directing or producing but I’m also trying to put some money away for when I can’t do any of those things anymore.
Which means that I have to juggle a lot of different priorities. I can’t make ‘being an artist’ my number one priority as perhaps I could in my 20’s.
And yet, having these restraints is actually making me feel more like an artist. Now I’m an artist with my feet on the ground and a clear view of the horizon rather than the artist I use to be who floated around in the ether never sure what I wanted or where I was going. I was forever reacting instead of planning.
Now I know that I’m an artist who is ‘paying my mortgage, saving for old age and trying to honour my creative spirit.’ Whatever I can do that fits within that equation is great and I will embrace it with everything I’ve got. Everything outside of that equation is beyond my grasp and not even worth looking at.
That actually makes my life easier and more manageable and that peace of mind allows me to be more creative.
What’s your equation? What are the parameters that you’re working within? What’s your bottom line?
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