The Great Challenge of the Artist Is to Live

The great challenge of the artist is to live - to live and not succumb to madness, self-destruction and early death. This is because gifts of creativity, free-sparking imagination and stampeding idea flow are so often coupled with the internal challenges of emotional instability and vulnerability, mania and despair. I believe this duality can be managed and self-annihilation can be avoided for the artist. However, it is a formidable task and it is not often spoken about frankly and with practical insight as to how it may be done.

Most of the gifts of the artist are irrelevant to the market and the market serves as a kind of mysterious god of awe and reverence in our society. Consequently, practical advice for how to live and not die as an artist is often in short supply - we're just not important enough. We are also rightly seen as threats to the established miserabilist order. And so we die young. We are overcome by the other, tumultuous side of the artistic gift.

But it does not have to be this way. When we recognize that creativity, by its very nature, contains seeds of destruction, we can learn to be prepared for the storms. We can develop habits and skills to limit the duration, frequency and intensity of them. We can be practical. We can live guided by notions of self-respect and self-love, not the self-denigration or romanticized self-destruction so often proffered to us.