Nobody warns you that when you finally get to do the thing you love every single day, you will eventually have a Tuesday where you look at the thing you love and think, oh, it’s you again.
I’m allowed to say this because I adore my work. I built this whole studio out of adoration. But I went full time on it this spring, and full time means the drawing I used to sneak off to do for joy is now also the thing waiting for me every morning with a list. The love didn’t go anywhere, fortunately. But it did gain a few roommates: the files, the emails, the administrative parade that follows any art the moment it becomes a living. And when you see anything every day, even something beautiful, your eyes start to slide right past it. Ask anyone who lives near the ocean and has stopped looking at the ocean.
I got married in October, so I’ve been thinking about this in marriage terms, because making art for a living is a marriage and not a fling. In the fling stage everything is electric and you’d happily stay up until three in the morning together, and honestly that stage was wonderful and I miss her sometimes. But the marriage is where the real life happens, and every married person knows the secret nobody prints on the wedding invitations: you have to spend a little time apart sometimes, even when you married your best friend, especially then. Parker goes off to his brushes and his books, I go off to whatever I go off to, and we come back to each other delighted all over again. And I think that art deserves the same arrangement.
Here’s what happens when I refuse it. The work keeps getting made, because I’m dutiful and the shop doesn’t run itself, but a specific flatness creeps in. I stop drawing because something tickled me and start drawing because it’s Tuesday. And the cruelest part is that the work made in that state is usually fine, fine enough that nobody else notices, which means the only person who can call the intermission is me.
So I’ve learned, slowly and with a lot of resistance, to call it. A few days where I don’t draw anything and don’t apologize for it. I clean the house. I read. I sit and give the trees my updates. I go be a wife and a friend and a person who watches four movies in a row. The first day feels indulgent and the second day feels vaguely criminal, because self-employed artists can convert rest directly into guilt, it’s damn near a talent. Meanwhile, every field lies fallow sometimes, every theater drops the curtain between acts, and the whole month I named my studio after is the earth taking a long luxurious break. October doesn’t apologize to anybody. I’m trying to learn from her.
And then, reliably, somewhere around day three or four, I start missing it. Not the shop, not the list, the drawing itself. I catch my brain doodling without permission, turning a lamp in a restaurant into line work, casting the couple at the next table in some little illustrated scene they’ll never know about. The pull comes back on its own, the way appetite does.
Stepping away used to feel like a small betrayal of the work, proof I didn’t want it badly enough. But I think the artists who never step back are the ones who quietly stop seeing their own work, the same way you stop seeing your own hallway. Stepping back is just the walk to the rear of the gallery, so the painting can be a whole painting again instead of a wall of brushstrokes.
The last time I took my few days, I came back on a Monday morning, sat down at my desk, and felt something I hadn’t felt in weeks, which was lucky. Lucky to be here, lucky this is the job, lucky these strange little drawings are mine to make. I picked up the pencil like I was picking up the phone to call someone I missed.
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