THE MYTH AND REALITY OF BEING AN ARTIST
Amongst the questions artists hear on repeat are these: what made you decide to be an artist, do you have a routine, are you disciplined, and who are your influences.
‘Being an artist’ is very different to the daily business of making art and being deeply involved in sustained practice and process. ‘Being an artist’ comes with set of cliches: instinctively creative, eccentrically dressed, pets everywhere, paint on every surface, relationships, studio and house chaotic, finances in ruins, and an over-reliance on drink or other substances for inspiration. Rational thought, analysis, spreadsheets and organisation rarely make it into that picture.
Why I Make Sculpture
The driving force behind my practice is the desire to engage with life in its broadest sense and to make sense of my own experiences and thoughts through form. Sculpture, for me, is a way of thinking aloud: a search for understanding carried out in clay, concrete and through drawing. Being an artist, for me, is less about performing an identity and more about staying in honest, often uncomfortable conversation with life, materials, and work.
This is a questioning, exploratory way of working. It requires curiosity and persistence, because things can go wrong. Doubts can find a chink, works over which one has laboured can fail or fall, crack, collapse off the armature. Some accidents are frustrating; others open up something unexpected and alive. For instance, when a piece hits the floor, there can be a moment of magic in what’s revealed. One has to stay open to that possibility, or accept that it goes into the bin and the process begins again.
Although I am a sculptor who makes objects, I seldom begin with the fixed intention of producing a particular object. The work evolves under my guiding hand, through a dialogue between thought, the resistance and suggestion of the materials, and those small or dramatic ‘accidents’ along the way.
Routine, Discipline, and the Less Glamorous Bits
I am not much fun to live with if I’m kept out of the studio for any extended time. Total immersion is part of it, but so is the simple fact that practice is just that: practising, over and over, to deepen knowledge and skill.
When people ask if I am disciplined or have a routine, what they often want to know is how long and how often I work in the studio, as if this is a measure of the quality of work or your commitment. The reality is that artistic practice is far wider than the hours physically spent in front of the work. If you are lucky enough to have shed the day job and can focus on art, you have to attend to a spectrum of related tasks:
Photographing completed work and documenting it properly.
Updating databases with titles, dimensions, materials, prices and provenance.
Writing blog posts, maintaining a website, and marketing exhibitions.
Keeping in touch with galleries, applying for shows, and liaising with clients over commissions.
Researching, reading around the themes of the work, journalling, visiting exhibitions, and quietly scoping out spaces and opportunities.
Ordering supplies, researching materials, and maintaining tools and studio.
Very successful artists may have assistants to shoulder some of this, but the tasks themselves are universal. They require a disciplined, organised approach that sits awkwardly with the stereotype of the artist as chaotic and impractical.
As for routine, all serious work, creative or otherwise, depends on it. Studio time comes first, with everything else fitting around it as best it can. Yet it is also true that the work continues when one is not physically present. Problems can be tussled with in thought, so that the next time one enters the studio, possibilties mulled over in quieter moments can be explored.
The Knotty Question of Influence
Influence is a vexed subject. The question usually comes from an understandable place: if people can locate your work in relation to a known artist or movement, it gives them an entry point. But from the inside, it is rarely so tidy.
All of life, in one way or another, is influential. Books, relationships, landscapes, politics, ageing, music, stray conversations, all of it can feed the work. The greats of art history do shape one’s practice, but their relevance tends to be specific to certain phases rather than constant and fixed.
More enduring are the subjects and questions that slowly become central: the themes that insist on returning, the forms that keep resurfacing, the tensions that are difficult to resolve. These take time to emerge as the core of a practice, and time again to articulate in ways that others can grasp. Hence the artist’s statement: an imperfect but increasingly necessary bridge between the maker’s preoccupations and the viewer’s bafflement.
Living With the Work
In the end, being an artist has little to do with living up to a stereotype and everything to do with maintaining a long, sometimes gruelling, sometimes exhilarating conversation with the work. It is a life built from small, repetitive actions, long stretches of uncertainty, admin lists, occasional disasters, and those rare moments of intense joy when something finally comes right, or someone purchases a piece.