Time and what you do with it
About this time last year I went to an exhibition of prints, paintings and stained glass by Christian Waller, an art nouveau artist from Castlemaine, Victoria. The artworks were incredible. Absolute artistry: technique combined with expression. Each work had mythical underpinnings as Waller was interested in theosophy and expressed her studies in what she created. I found the exhibition moving and inspiring. But I also felt a deep well of frustration that sits inside me.
What I saw in those artworks was the expression of time. The exhibition reminded me making good art is a full-time job. To reach that level of technical mastery, as well as to have the ability to move people many, many years after she created her art, Waller needed the time to become excellent at her craft. These were the works of someone who had given much time to her creative gifts.
Finding Time to Create
I have spent many years fitting my writing around real life. Raising children, earning an income, the mundanities of every day living such as doing the washing. These are all things I have given priority to over my writing, my entire life.
But whatever I have done over the years, there’s always been a part of me burning to create. To write stories, to draw and paint, to express myself in creative ways. I was trained as a social worker and worked in social work for many years, but it never felt like my vocation. Then I had children and spent years raising them, including a long period of home-schooling them. Once my children were becoming independent, I went back to study because I’d been out of the workforce so long. This led me to become an academic editor, which was enormously helpful in becoming a better writer. But it was another task to add to my time.
The Creative Flame
Throughout all those years the creative drive was burning inside me. And I was barely fuelling the flame. My writing always came last, fitted around everything else that needed to be done. When I was published, I had a major dose of imposter syndrome because I felt I had barely given any time to writing. In reality, that’s not true – you don’t end up with six novels, a musical, various plays and any number of short stories if you haven’t spent time writing. But it was always peripheral. Creative time squeezed in around the edges of living time.
As you get older, this issue becomes more pressing. As more of my family pass away, my awareness that we all only have a limited span becomes more acute. I have health issues that may restrict my ability to sit and type in the future. At some point, writing stories may become more difficult. Often people don’t do things they want to do, because they think there’s always time. Our days pile up behind us, filled with a lot of the things we have to do, and less of the things we love to do. But time isn’t an endless resource. So feed your creative flame. Bring beautiful things into the world. Make people think and feel with your words and songs and art. Remind us we are human.
Artists, whether writers, painters, sculptors or any other medium, are generally not paid well. This has been true throughout history. We know the image of the struggling writer starving in a garret so well it is almost a cliche. And the painterly genius who died in poverty. It’s part of the story we tell about artists. To create true art, the idea goes, we need suffering. Hunger is apparently a great motivator.
There have always been gatekeepers to the creative arts. These were once known as patrons. Now they have many different titles but they are always the ones who decide whether artists will be paid for their work or not. And since the ‘economy’ narrative places a low value on art, the gatekeepers don’t feel the need to pay them very much. In fact, the unspoken argument is often that artists do what they do for the love of it, so reimbursement doesn’t need to be that high. Their reward is the joy of creating. There is a growing trend of asking creatives to produce something for ‘exposure’ or so they can ‘put it on their CV’.