To make art, under any circumstance, requires at least as much free time as it takes to execute the work.
When things get too hectic, too crowded, too busy, when life is so full that there is not enough time to attend to something other than the necessities immediately at hand – it becomes unlikely, or impossible, to work artistically.
I say this … then instantly want to withdraw that statement.
There is no time, barring moments of most extreme duress, when there is not some yearning for a creative outlet, and more, when the mind is not chewing on itself and everything around it for the expressive possibilities life presents. There is never a cessation to the artistic impulse, and so, there is equally no retreat from the mental posture that gestates and realizes art.
Robert Heinecken, He:/She: series
She: Do you like being referred to as an artist?
He: yes.
She: Do you like having to be an artist all the time?
He: Less.
She: Is there such a thing as an ex-artist?
He: Unfortunately, no.
And again I feel like I want to retract some of the sense of inevitability and infinite potentiality that the prior statement caries. It is not enough merely to think about making art, to have the impulse and the ideas, to (in my case) see the image but not photograph it. The thought and the thing it produces are always different, execution is never immaculate, heterogeneous, or entirely predictable. And with that in mind, after a long enough period of incubation without materialization, after so many interesting thoughts and not so many manifestations of those thoughts, every new creative impulse begins to feel a little stale, a little stifled. Like discovering a new seed when you are already starving for the fruit.
So why struggle to make that time, that room, that sanctum where you can make art?
That, I believe anyone who’s experienced these difficulties will say, only you can answer. On the other hand, if you don’t clear a path to where you can produce the work you so wish for, you’ll have to bear the constant – maddening – feeling of struggling to breathe, not with your lungs with your heart.
