There is a dogged delusion that art is made in dramatic bursts—in the absinthe haze of a Parisian garret, in the frenzy of a studio littered with cigarette butts and merlot bottles, in the dysfunction of affairs and alcoholism. We like to imagine the artist as gloriously ungoverned by calendars and clocks, unfettered by the commonplace concerns that chain the rest of us.
But what if art depends on discipline and not dysfunction? What if making art is like clocking in at any other job: routine, repetitive, not nearly as romantic as drowning in heartbreak and writing tragic sonnets?
In her elegant, erudite Art Work, photographer Sally Mann dispels the myth that creativity thrives on chaos. If anything, artists need design—not disorder. Mann doesn’t wait for inspiration to descend like summer lightning over the Virginia fields. She schedules it like a dentist appointment in her calendar.
There’s a persistent myth that to be an artist your life has to be worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster: glamorous like Fitzgerald guzzling gin and gallivanting across Europe or Hemingway hunting leopards in East Africa. The artist—we’re told—is as eccentric as Dali, as promiscuous as Picasso.
But the most prolific artists often lead quiet, uneventful lives more like a reclusive Emily Dickinson scribbling poems in her bedroom.
T.S. Eliot wrote masterpieces of modernism while working at his distinctly unromantic job at a London bank. Wallace Stevens walked to the office each morning and, somewhere between policies and paperwork, imagined looking at a blackbird thirteen ways.
Like a farmer or factory worker, an artist’s day should follow a predictable pattern: wake, create, repeat. If you’re truly dedicated to your craft, there’s little room for stormy love affairs or riotous nights on the Rivera. Romance is less important than routine.
For Mann, creativity must be scheduled, blocked out like a doctor’s appointment or play date. Your time to make art becomes non-negotiable once it’s written in ink.
Like any other obligation on your to-do list, art must be planned or it won’t take place. We can’t wait for a glorious week of uninterrupted hours—we have to settle for cramped crannies on the calendar. 15 minutes here, another 15 minutes there. For over half a century, Mann has squeezed art into the spare moments between managing her Virginia farm and changing diapers.
To carve out more time for creation, Mann suggests minimizing mundane matters. Make the same 5 meals over and over. Wear the same thing every day like Einstein or Steve Jobs. You’ll have a sartorial signature (after all, who can see an effortlessly stylish black turtleneck without thinking of the Apple founder?), but, more importantly, you’ll reduce decision fatigue so you can focus on what truly matters.
As Mann writes,
“You need to organize your time. Like craft and technique, the humble structural underpinnings of your meteoric artistic career should you have one, will likely be invisible, but they will be essential. Anne Truitt wrote in Daybook: The Journal of an Artist that there is an appalling amount of mechanical work in an artist’s life, and to manage it, yep, right at the top of her lists is lists–an artist needs the time management skills of a small business owner. One trick to save time, which was revealed to me by a very successful Hollywood actor, is to decide on a day’s menu that is toothsome and healthy every day…The other thing is to find an outfit you like and a buy a bunch of them, varying the colors day to day. She could tell I knew the clothes part already, wearing the same Levi’s jeans every day (bought first when I was sixteen at the Putney school store–and still in 28 by 30, can you believe?), the same Blundstones from before every Brooklyn hipster was wearing them, the same cotton shirts from Goodwill…If you can pare your daily decisions down, food and clothes are no longer things you have to waste time thinking about. Yes, maybe you appear to live a boring, undeviating life, but that is one thing you should not be afraid of. Your work will not be boring.”
For Mann, art exists alongside the everyday. Art isn’t made in ecstatic bursts or delivered by some divine force. The artist isn’t a solitary genius who creates in a rapturous frenzy of inspiration—they simply show up.
In a passage equal parts pragmatic and profound, Mann reframes art not as a mystical visitation from the muse, but as a steady, unshakable devotion to the work:
“Ideally in your day ‘at work’ you did indeed make some art, but you also checked off the list ‘change oil’ and ‘stool sample to the vet.’ The measure of artistic success is not money; it is time. And you must regulate it like the metronymic steps of the most unflappable Beefeater on parade. Let people make fun of my Day-Timer, clutched to my breast like a rosary. But knowing what I have to do every hour of every day and every week of every month, is what allows me to schedule, yes, schedule, creativity. It doesn’t drift down and lightly settle upon us like a gauzy visitation from the muse. You have to clear a well-lit and GPS-coordinated landing strip for it.”
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