Apparently, I've lost the plot

This week, someone wrote to tell me I’ve lost the plot.

She said she'd followed me for years, taken several of my courses, and learned a great deal. But my recent newsletter had apparently revealed something worrying: my world had become too small.

Her concern was that, in choosing more quiet, I was shutting out life. Great artists, she explained, engage with the world and express it in their work.

My first response was less philosophical than what follows (can you imagine thinking you know about a stranger's life based on what they share in newsletters?) but once I got past that I was grateful for the email because I realised there’s something in it for all of us.

See, there was one thing she’d noticed correctly: I have changed and I think how and why that happened is relevant to all of us.

I have been very fortunate to do work that I love and that work has been successful, resulting in a life that had become so big and so intense that I was finding it hard to hear my own creative voice. I spent too much time engaged with other people and with my business. Added to all my personal responsibilities and stresses, there was no room for me.

I’m someone who absorbs what’s happening around me. Put me in a city or a crowded social scene and I seem to take in all the ambient stress, all the emotions, all the energy. As a porous Pisces, I sometimes feel I don’t have a skin.

I loved living in New York. It’s a fabulous city but it also made me ill. I love visiting London, but after a few days I feel battered and bruised by all that energy, and I’m ready to come home. When I was younger, I thought this was something I ought to overcome. Now I understand that it’s just who I am.

So, I began to quieten my life and to be more careful about what I let in. I let go of some things. I gave up some responsibilities. I began to spend more time in nature. 

Before long, I noticed some major changes. The peace and solitude helped me reconnect with my art and I became much more productive in the studio. More surprisingly, stepping away from formal teaching seems to have ignited a new passion for sharing what I know. For example, I’m now super-inspired to make YouTube videos and I’ve fallen back in love with writing this newsletter.

I'm not alone in discovering the value of a different way of living. In 1967, Agnes Martin left the New York art scene and settled in New Mexico in search of solitude and silence. Georgia O’Keeffe also made New Mexico her permanent home and began to make work inspired by the nature that surrounded her. Cy Twombly moved to Italy while New York was the major centre of the happening art world. Claude Monet retreated to Giverny where he created the garden that would become the subject of all his work.

But there was something else in that email that stayed with me. What exactly do we mean by “engaging with life”?

I find it hard to imagine a life more full than the one I’m living. Caring for someone who needs you. Carrying the emotional load. Holding a friend through something difficult. Watching someone you love die, and attending funerals that came far too soon. Forging new friendships with amazing women. Taking trips filled with art, food and laughter.

What are these things, if they aren’t life?

There’s a familiar hierarchy here, and I think many women will recognise it. We have spent centuries being told which parts of human experience deserve to be taken seriously. Our concerns are too domestic. Our lives are too ordinary. Our emotions are not important.

In art, this hierarchy had practical consequences. Well into the nineteenth century, women were excluded from the life-drawing classes they needed. To this day, at the highest echelons of the art world, paintings made by women sell for much less than those made by men.

So I’m wary when anyone defines “life” in a way that seems to leave out so much of the life women have always lived. The caring, the relationships, the private grief, and the everyday work of keeping other people going—there is nothing small about these experiences. An artist could spend a lifetime exploring them and still have more to say.

Which brings me to why I wanted to share this with you... Artists hear sweeping declarations all the time.

Serious art has to address politics. Artists need to belong to a ‘scene.’ You need to learn to draw properly before you paint. You should loosen up. You should tighten up.

And if you lack confidence, these judgments can stop you in your tracks. Before you know it, you’re questioning the very thing that made you want to create in the first place.

Now I’m certainly not suggesting we should reject every criticism. Sometimes useful feedback is uncomfortable. But there’s a difference between someone helping you make the work you want to make, and someone telling you that you ought to want something else.

So, if your soul craves quiet, make room for quiet. If you come alive among people, seek them out. If you’re fascinated by something that someone else considers trivial, follow that fascination and see where it takes you. It is just not true that there is one type of art that matters more than any other, or one type of artist who is doing it "right."

As an artist, your deepest obligation is to become more and more yourself. Your job is to learn what you care about, what you need, and what you have to say, and to find ways to express that fully, no matter what anyone else thinks.

That is how worthwhile art is made and it seems to me, it’s also how worthwhile lives are lived.