Week 4 – Discovering a Sense of Adventure (Part 3 of 3)

Invention vs. Convention

“As artists, we are most often innovators. Those who work with our work – agents, managers, publishers, gallery owners, curators, producers – are most often conservers.”

“Conservers focus on ‘how it’s done’.” They think they know what art is going to sell. They want us as artists to create what they want created, what the “market” is going to purchase. It does not allow us to create what our inner-self is guiding us to create. This leads to unhappiness and unrest. Create what you are guided by God to create anyway! He is the Great Creator, not the conservers.

“Well-meaning advisers can advise us straight into a creative slump, straight into a fallow period, straight into a wall of inner resistance. They forget that they cannot sell what we do not make and so often urge us to make what they know they can sell, forgetting that if they deaden our spirits too often and too much, the work will deaden as well and there will be nothing to sell.”

“As artists, we have a form of inner power the advisers can never extinguish or ultimately thwart. And this is always the key.”

“Since each of us in one-of-a-kind, the market, for all its supposed predictability, is actually vulnerable to falling in love with any of us at any time.” I love this!

Create away!