h.d reynolds

Attempts to share this via tumblr-native means are failing …

via  hypotheticalwren via austinkleon

In his Autobiography, William Carlos Williams recounts what led him to pursue medicine as a career:

No one was ever going to be in a position to tell me what to write, and you can say that again. No one, and I meant no one (for money) was ever (never) going to tell me how or what I was going to write. That was number one…

I wasn’t going to make any money by writing. Therefore I had to have a means to support myself…for I didn’t intend to die for art nor to be bedbug food for it…

It was money that finally decided me. I would continue medicine, for I was determined to be a poet; only medicine, a job I enjoyed, would make it possible for me to live and write as I wanted to. I would live: that first, and write, by God, as I wanted to if it took me all eternity to accomplish my design. My furious wish was to be normal, undrunk, balanced in everything. I would marry (but not yet!) have children and still write, in fact, therefore to write. I would not court disease, live in the slums for the sake of art, give lice a holiday. I would not “die for art,” but live for it, grimly! and work, work, work (like Pop), beat the game and be free (like Mom, poor soul!) to write, write as I alone should write…

I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing more frequently. 

if I were to work at my non-art job a lot less, I would improve and perhaps even become good enough at my art job to make a living (everyone laugh) at it.  I’m certainly doing my arty talents no favors by working to the point of exhaustion at my ‘real’ job every day, limiting my drawing / painting time to the weekends - effectively resigning the effort of marketing my work and gaining exposure to the fates.

But I cringe at this notion that An Artist Can Only Do Art Well and Should Only Do Art Well.  I happen to really like My Not-Art Job.  In fact, it may be the perfect job, outside of being some sort of moneyed fashion-collecting heiress (I’m waiting for my shot at Daphne Guinesses’ gig).  And I think that many arty folk - musicians, writers, chocolate-strewn performance artistes, etc. - have an itch that only a non-creative job can scratch.  My withdrawal into the land of intangibles.  Code wrangling and function building and stored procedure writing condenses me so that when I meet my Saturday morning (early, thanks to my weekly non-bohemian schedule), I am full of ideas (usually) and have the focus and energy to spend 48 hours on art without distraction.  And by Sunday evening, I am really ready to get back into the code writing business.

Perhaps I’m just telling myself that I like things the way they are because I am a terrible artist and stand no chance at ever making much of it or myself in the marketplace and I’ll retire wizened, used up, and with a paltry 401k like almost everyone else - and that’s fine.  But I’d like to think that most creative types are actually complicated people who are capable and, at least in my case, more than willing to do something other than Just Art, All The Time.

I’ll go ahead and push it even further and say I think I would hate being dependent on my art to eat and live.  Unless I was so incredibly successful that I could have an agent handle everything for me, the need to talk about art/arty/art/art/artish things/ideas/people/events with people would make me stop working.  The hustle for placement and funds.  It sounds soul-sucking.

If making a decent living doing something I love in the most comfortable manner I see fit makes me bourgeois, oink oink.