Rethinking the Messy Artist Trope
I’m a creature of habit, routine, systems and order.
For an artist, perhaps this comes as a surprise. Indeed, it feels very off-brand: the creative mess that often surrounds those who identify as creatives is romanticised, even glorified. Artists are supposed to embrace life’s colourful chaos and find inspiration within it, but I’m finally admitting to myself that instead of finding it inspiring, I just find it overstimulating.
For years I fought against my regimented, ordered way of being. I wanted to be the sort of person who was inspired by that slightly dishevelled state. Almost like a form of internalised ablism, my routines felt like a crutch that I shouldn’t need in order to function as a ‘proper’ artist, or even a ‘proper’ adult person.
While others seemed to get through life just fine without heavily relying on a carefully devised regimen, last year I began to embrace my innately ordered self. Instead of shunning my natural instinct in favour of something that looked from the outside to be more creative and artistic, I decided to lean in to it, and it’s been a revelation. It’s like I’d been operating with one arm tied behind my back this whole time.
And it turns out I’m not alone. Among all the nuggets of wisdom in The Creative Act, Rick Rubin spends several pages extolling the virtue of habits and routines.
“Discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are partners. Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it is a harmonious relationship with time.”
- Rick Rubin, The Creative Act.
To provide some context of how I came to realise this rather fundamental facet of myself, let me share a story.
Last year posed some extreme challenges to my dependency on routine and order when my husband and I embarked on a two month renovation that encompassed a large swathe of our home, including my studio.
We planned to live in our house during the work. I thought I had adequately prepared for the upheaval, the noise, the dust, and the break from routine. I had done a lot of mental prep and visualisation, walking through how I imagined the next two months to unfold as I packed away my studio and dining room and protected each of the rooms that weren’t going to be touched by the builders using copious dust sheets and dust-proof zip doors.
Given my tendency towards catastrophising and anticipating the worst, I thought I was ready.
I was not ready. It became immediately evident that the reality was somehow even dustier, louder, and far more unsettling than I’d imagined. All my routines fell by the wayside on day one, and looking back I don’t know how I ever thought it could have unfolded any other way. Wishful thinking, I suppose!
As hard as it was to find myself suddenly without the routines that ground me, I learned an incredible amount about who I am and how my brain works, and most glaringly, what doesn’t work for me. Without my beloved predictable routine, everything fell apart pretty swiftly. My mental and physical health both suffered enormously, and my art practice fell off the map entirely. I felt robbed of my creative spark. For a couple of months after the builders left I was so depleted that I couldn’t bring myself to set my studio back up, and even once I’d got that space usable again it took another couple of months to stoke the creative furnace that usually comes so easily.
With my routines gone, I understood that, much more than a crutch or coping mechanism, my routines are actually best understood as a framework within which my creativity can flow. It was this experience that required me to finally accept and embrace my default setting. Having been knocked so wildly off course and separated for so long from my easel, I can fully appreciate the value that a predictable routine and environment offers my organised, system-loving brain. With this knowledge, I’m learning to harness this trait instead of feeling embarrassed by it as I once was.
This year I’m building on this new understanding and tweaking my process to best serve the art I make and allow it to flow through me unhindered. Hopefully this will allow me to show up more consistently and sustainably, something that I’m wanting to do now that I’m accepting commissions and not solely painting for myself.
On that note, in the coming weeks I’m going to be sharing details on how to commission your own cosmic landscape. Keep an eye out!
