How Do You Prioritize Your Art and Creativity?

My experience has been that most artists and craftspeople would like to think that they take their creative endeavors seriously.

But what does that actually mean, to you?

The whole "starving artist" stereotype aside, the vast majority of artists who are actually full-time and dependent on their artwork as their main source of income represent a tiny minority of the overall total.

Most of us are "part timers" and hobbyists to various degrees, so we have to find/make time for creative work in a possibly already pretty full schedule of life.

For the longest time, my own art was something I pursued on a "as time is available on the weekends" sort of proposition, and I'm sad to admit that there would be long periods of time where art took the backseat to work, housework, kids, pets, gardening and so forth.

All the while, I was telling myself that I was definitely taking my art "seriously."

Of course, I wasn't actually getting anything done, and there was a certain frustration to that.

While we had the brick-and-mortar gallery, I naturally spent a lot of time talking to fellow artists and one of the things that became very clear to me is that if you feel that art is important to you, you have to assign it importance in your life.

In other words, it can't be what you do "after everything else is done."

One of the more successful approaches — and how I work these days — is to simply set a time for art/creativity every day, much like you might set a time for an exercise class, or something similar.

Perhaps it doesn't really make much of a difference in your day and in how much time you have, but it does seem to result in a shift in your mental state, in the sense that it now becomes other things that get seen to "later," instead of your creative endeavors.

I sort of lost track of this practice during the Covid years because I didn't have to go and carve out 10 hours a day at the gallery anymore, but earlier this year I started "scheduling" art time again, albeit with a little more flexibility.

I now treat art as the equivalent of a small part-time job that I "have to" spend 10 hours a week at, but I'm on flex time with it. As a result, the creative aspects of my life are going a lot better, and I find that I actually have an easier time replenishing work for the various art fairs and festivals I attend over the course of a typical year.

I allow myself a bit of extra latitude in my scheduling, in the sense that my creative time can also be used for such things as updating my web site, catching up on social media marketing and some of the surrounding activities we artists invariably have to deal with.

All in all, it's working out pretty well!

Thanks for visiting, and feel free to leave a comment — engagement is always welcome!

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