Are You Free?

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

What a Freedom! 1903 Ilia Efimovich Repin

Ann and I have often discussed how odd our lives as artists must appear to others who are traditionally employed. We don’t go to a workplace somewhere—our studios are in our home. We tend to work alone on an activity that many people regard as recreational. We vigilantly protect our time for pure art making. We generally have few deadlines when creating new work (unless we have an exhibition), and it may be difficult to measure what we have accomplished, if anything, at the end of the day. We set the standards and goals for our own work, and we decide when the work is “done”.

To make matters more mystifying, the object of all this disciplined effort is not to create a product for a market. Art from the heart is not easily created that way, for the higher mind and spirit will never cooperate fully with an effort rooted only in the ultimately inconsequential world of economics. Our higher minds seem to be design…