The Nature of Making Art (The Single Most Life-Changing Perspective an Artist Can Ever Hear)

Making Art is a Gift—Grace—We Receive and Serve

“If the work comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am, serve me.’ then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist’s talent is not what it is about” 

— Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, Walking on Water, pp 23.

Our job as writers, painters, and artists of every endeavor is not to try to think up the greatest thing, to create something contrived that we think will look great and be admired or impactful. It is instead, simply and powerfully, to receive the work that comes to us and serve it by being obedient to its directions, whims, and desires. Genius-artist Taylor Swift describes this occurrence as the “moment when a magical cloud floats right down in front of you in the form of an idea or a song, and all you have to do is grab it. Then shape it like clay. Prune it like a garden” (Acceptance speech for the Songwriter-Artist of the Decade Award at the Nashville Songwriters International’s National Songwriter Awards, Nashville, Tenn., September 20, 2022). Each art piece is its own being, broader than our understanding of it, and approaches us asking if we will cooperate with its claiming us as its birthing vessel and help bring it into the world. 

How freeing, yet in a way terrifying, this is. It’s swirling-in-a-wide-open-field freeing because I don’t need to do everything, make everything, hoping something of it is great enough to validate me as an artist. I don’t need to be great to be an artist, all I need to do is serve the work. But it is also frightening for making art to be so outside of my understanding and prediction. If I forget that making art is a gift I humbly submit to, then “I fight against it by asserting my control, by behaving as if the painting… needs my interpretive activity to give it life—not an artifact that speaks to me, addresses me, makes me accountable. And so my experience of a painting also reveals my resistance to the receptive life of faith and my addiction to the active life of works, refusing to respect the painting before which I stand as a singular event of creative agency which makes claim on me” (Seidell, The Audience). Receiving each piece takes the courage to lay down our illusion of control and embrace that we are dependent on the gift of getting to serve it.

We can’t command what our art communicates or manufacture its meaning, because “The meaning of a poem exists somewhere between the poem and the reader” (T.S. Eliot). The art itself has something to say to its recipient that we won’t know until the audience engages with it. So, the artist simply works to be obedient to the work so that when it connects with someone they can see some of what it knows. And then, when “it is the words that summon us. The tale is often wiser than the teller” (Dana Gioia, The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet) and we are gobsmacked and overjoyed that we got to help be a small part of this thing that is bigger than us.