WHERE IS YOUR FIRE?
I have been wondering lately what happened to the fire of being an artist.
Not inspiration.
Not productivity.
Not whether you managed to finish something this week.
I mean devotion.
When did being an artist become something we were supposed to fit neatly around everything else?
When did we stop being willing to be inconvenienced by it?
To spend money on it. To spend time on it. To go somewhere because something might happen there. To learn something we don't already know. To be in a room with other artists. To get obsessed. To make the ridiculous choice occasionally because the art mattered that much.
Where is the hunger?
And I wonder how much of this has to do with the strange isolation we have been living inside.
We spend enormous amounts of time being shown the world without actually being in it.
Bad news arrives all day long. Other people's fear, outrage, catastrophe, arguments and emergencies come through the same little rectangle we use to talk to our friends and look at people's paintings.
Social media gives us the sensation of being among people while we are very often sitting alone.
And after enough of that, staying home can begin to feel like participation. Watching can begin to feel like doing. Reading about what everyone else is making can begin to occupy the place where being among artists used to be.
I don't think artists are immune to any of this.
I think we can become isolated. Cautious. Tired. Overinformed and undernourished. We can begin protecting our time, our money, our energy and ourselves so thoroughly that eventually very little gets through.
Including art.
I don't mean that artists should exhaust themselves, impoverish themselves, or prove their seriousness through suffering. I have no interest in that old story.
But I am interested in the difference between protecting ourselves from that story and slowly removing everything that asks anything of us.
Because art asks something of us.
Attention, certainly.
But also curiosity. Participation. Risk. Money sometimes. Time sometimes. Other people sometimes. The willingness to leave the house. The willingness to be changed. The willingness to show up before we know whether showing up will be worth it.
And perhaps this is one of the more interesting things to look at during a season of harvest.
Not only:
What did I make?
But:
What did I give to being an artist?
Where did I invest?
Where did I participate?
Where did I put myself in the company of other artists?
Where did I follow my curiosity instead of merely agreeing that curiosity is important?
Where did I choose my art when choosing it actually cost me something?
And where did I keep saying that my art mattered while consistently giving everything else first claim on me?
That's not a question I think we need to answer with shame.
But I do think we need to answer it.
Because I don't believe the fire necessarily disappears.
Sometimes the world makes it very easy to sit beside it and scroll while it gets smaller.
At some point, we have to put the phone down.
Go find the other artists.
Bring something for the fire.
Where is your fire?
And if you aren't entirely sure where yours has gone, that might be worth investigating.
The Artistic Clarity Life Audit is free. You fill it out, send it to me, and I sit down with what you've written and send you my thoughts.
Think of it as taking a lantern around the property.
You may find the fire isn't out at all.
Pattie MilesArtistic Clarity • Steepwitch
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