Idiosyncratic Personal Visions
My sticky notes from Making Art and Making a Living by Mason Currey:
[This book is] a quasi-history of making art and making a living--of patrons, day jobs, side hustles, strategic marriages, petty theft, palace intrigue and other adventures in funding a creative life, featuring a variety of brilliant minds from the Renaissance to the present day.
The painters Mark Rothko, Milton Avery, and Adolph Gottlieb were all supported by their wives.
familiar trajectory of ... years of struggle and uncertainty, often alongside miserable attempts to pay the bills through jobs that continually impinge on their time, energy, and optimism--until, finally, commercial success, and with it, at last, money and the opportunity to make art full-time.
the trade-offs [of working to pay the bills while trying to make art] are low pay, exhausting work, lack of stability, and a different kind of brain-drain, the kind that comes from continually performing labor that does not draw upon your intellectual capacity or in any way validate your existence as a person of creativity, judgement and skill. ("What cookie would you like") [this being part of Acker's script when she worked at a cookie stand].
Baudelaire was expelled from school after:
refusing to pass over a note passed to him by a fellow student, defiantly swallowing it instead.
then:
[Embarked upon] what was supposed to be a long sea voyage to India, a journey pushed on him by his mother and stepfather, who sought to separate Baudelaire from the life of bohemian excess he had been living over the previous few years ... [A]fter three months, Baudelaire jumped ship in Mauritius and refused to travel any further, returning to Paris to assume control of his inheritance.
On the coupling of American abstract-expressionist Grace Hartigan and Robert Jachens:
After marriage: escape. Inspired by the 1935 movie version of Jack London's The Call of the Wild, Hartigan and Jachens quit their jobs and travelled across the country by bus, intending to become pioneers in what was then called the Alaska Territory. But they ran out of money in Los Angeles, where Hartigan also discovered she was pregnant, to her dismay; the life of adventure and creativity she was seeking seemed to be over before it had even begun.
Hartigan on holding down a job while also trying to make art:
I think I'm incapable of sustaining a painting mood while working 8 hours a day. ... If I must do it, I shouldn't even try to paint at the same time.
She went on to try temping as a compromise, working for a period and then quitting to paint for a period of similar length. "To live and paint before the money ran out again."
On Kathy Acker:
Acker's writing was a plea for something more from life: a wider range of experience, deeper connections, less self-editing, and fewer pointless hang-ups. She dreamed of a society that allowed for "a whole range of feelings--really a fuller life," she said in a 1991 interview. "I keep thinking: what we know of as 'life' is so thin and juiceless and boring, frankly--we're ground into nothing before we even start out!"
Poet Wallace Stevens, who had a day job:
I wish that I could give all my time to the thing, instead of a few hours each evening when I am often physically and mentally dull ... It takes me so long to get the day out of my mind and to focus myself on what I am eager to do.
and:
I have not had a poem in my head for a month, poor Yorick.
and, when his daughter wanted to drop out of college to find a job instead:
You don't find yourself or your way through life by getting a job ... Take my word for it that making a living a waste of time. None of the great things in life have anything to do with making a living.
Filmmaker Godard's scheme while working for a switchboard:
Normally, the three telephonists would work back-to-back eight-hour shifts--but Godard suggested a new schedule ... [that t]he telephonists should pool their labour and each spend ten days [out of the month] on 24-hour duty and take the other twenty days off. The other telephonists were game, and thus Godard was able to draw a full wage while only working ten days out of the month, spending the other twenty days in Lausanne or Geneva. A friend described how Godard managed to work nonstop for ten days: "He spent the nights there on a cot, he got up when the telephone rang."
The integrity of Bernadette Mayer:
As a poet, I always tried to earn a living as a poet. I know it's stupid, I know it can't be done. But I figured--Let's do it.
Mayer's idea akin to UBI:
Take all the income that everyone in the United States makes in a year and divide it by the number of people in the country, including babies, and there you have it, done. "Give everybody everything," she wrote in a 2016 poem, and she meant it.
And finally:
What a funny, fretful business it is, trying to fund a life as an artist ... [Let us celebrate] the figures who hung in there anyway, and remained committed to their idiosyncratic personal visions.