How to be an Artist

In 10 simple steps that keep repeating forever

This week I held my bi-yearly notebook organization, in which I uncovered many treasures, one of which being this piece of writing titled “How to be an Artist” from April 2023. At first I thought it funny that I could have had half an idea of how it all worked, a year and a half ago. I feel that I have grown an enormous amount in this period of time, and so I expected this entry to be wildly naive. As it turns out, it remains remarkably accurate to my understanding. Maybe, it seems, being an artist is not so complex after all.

How to be an Artist

1. In order to be an artist the first thing you have to do is make some art. This can look like a lot of things such as an oil painting, a story about bees, or a series of potholders with quotes from songs that use the word “hot.”

2. Next, you have to find someone who likes your art. It does not matter if they are your mother or your second grade teacher who tells you that your drawings of space bats are “inventive.” It is about that one person, the first person who makes you realize that your sneaky, tricky, silly inner world might be kinda cool to other people also. Choosing to be an artist will mean cultivating, understanding and learning to listen to that inner world over the course of a lifetime. Choosing to expose those parts that make you you means that your work will not grow if you do not grow and so the search for art becomes a search for truth. You will not realize this until you are slightly too deep into being an artist to back out.

3. The next thing you have to do is take a walk. Being an artist requires taking many walks, because Thoreau took many walks and he is undoubtably a very successful artist. On this walk you should think about if you should maybe be sitting, since Monet was a very great painter and swore by stillness. You wonder if you are too crazy or perhaps too stable to be in the business of artmaking and then about the false attribution of artists as crazed. You know underneath it all that your success will rely on becoming unmistakably yourself but wonder what that means when right now your truest self is staring at the water thinking about what that even means. A guy with a drone comes and sits nearby so you leave. Those are no conditions for creativity.

4. Later that night, make some art. Get out your paints or your instruments or your 3 monitor setup and you try to open yourself and let the ideas flow. Unfortunately, you end up with a short GIF of a man eating his own mouth and decide to call it a night. After all, artists need either an exceptional amount of sleep or never enough.

5. Eventually, get a job. Get a job that gives you experience and new skills in your chosen medium and some relevant connections and mentors. This period of time will feel exciting and stressful and confusing. You will experience your own work under the harsh judgement of others, and feel surprised to find that you are no longer interested in making your art on the weekends anymore. So, you find a new hobby, like linoleum block printing that allows for a carefree outlet for your true artist while your weekday artist is busy making a career.

6. Almost immediately, you become obsessed with block printing – the tactile nature, the fact that no one is telling you what to do or how to do it. You spend your lunch breaks making new stamps. You cancel your plans. You wonder if you’ve been wrong all along, that this new form of art is the true passion you have been looking for – the obvious path to artistic freedom. You quit your job and start a stamp company from your living room. Business is slow at first, and you find that most of your time goes to advertising your services. Your friends and family are supportive, but slightly worried because your apartments smells like ink and you are relying heavily on your corporate savings to make ends meet. Eventually, block printing is not so fun anymore. It has become work, not art. You feel very confused and enroll in a meditation retreat in Canada.

7. Fast forward. You have 7 yesses and 143 nos to your name based on the “list of failure” you started in a period of exceptional defeat. But those yesses have served you well. You are able to support yourself as an artist, likely by mere endurance, you figure.

8. To be an artist, you must continue to have ideas. Sometimes your ideas come when you are running and sometimes when you’re stoned and one time a really good one came in the produce section of Key Foods so sometimes you go back there just to think. Today you wonder if maybe an idea will come on a walk, since you don’t feel like running and were just at Key Foods last night. Walking goes well. You look at the trees. You look at the water. You think of all the walks you’ve taken to get you to this one. You come to this spot often because of the spaciousness. Art requires spaciousness, you figure.

9. Next, you must sit and look at the water. Think about the future and then try very hard to refocus on the moment. There is a bulldozer nearby. You think about all the damn construction. Good.

10. Scream. You scream so loudly and piercingly that everything else starts screaming too. Until the cars and buildings and tourists at the hotdog stand are all wailing in unison, looking to you as their leader, the screamer. And then since you find all this screaming rather unpleasant, you clap, and the world claps after you in applause of itself. The flowers bow and then seem to applaud the children, small and eager, who are wildly applauding the boats who now look very proud to be moving with such a meticulous grace. But like anything, the clapping gets old and so you begin to dance, and slowly slip back home between the wiggling clusters of buildings and stores, flailing their tiny fingers towards the sun – involved in a kind of waltz of it’s own. “How peculiar,” you think to yourself. And so, like an artist, you get out your notebook and think of how to share this strange occurrence with the world.