Counsel no. 3: get organised
We each have strengths and weaknesses. Certain people are very organised at work and at home. For some, filling in applications for grants, managing budgets, and keeping account of the progression of on-going projects is child’s play. I am not one of those people. One can’t be good at everything and if you ask me, that kind of person is extremely hard to find.
Certain kinds of paperwork are insurmountable for me, and the income tax report is part of that category. Others are doable ... it’s these that I wish to address in this third counsel for young artists.
The stereotype of the damned artist, chaotic and rough, doesn’t help anyone. It is possible to leave space for the irrational and a certain off-handedness in the context of one’s studio practice, at the same time as leaving room for balance. Moreover, this balance contributes to a satisfying artistic expression or rendering. What is a satisfying artistic expression? It’s what we mean when we say « it’s going well » ... For things to go well for an artist, you have to look at more than just studio production, but at the artist’s surroundings as well. It has to do with all of that.
In being an independent worker, the artist must be his or her own teacher in several areas of expertise. He or she will be called to step outside of the comfort zone, and will have to use some managerial skills to “break out”. What is an artist who « breaks out »? It is someone who succeeds in having an art practice. Does that mean that the artist makes a living solely from their art? Not necessarily, but we will come back to that later. For now, let’s go back to paperwork.
Important papers to have a grasp on for accounting purposes (aside from the T4 provided from our day job employer):
- receipts from expenses related to your art practice: materials, equipment, representation charges, studio rentals, exhibit space rentals, website hosting costs, and restaurant dinners with clients, etc.
- invoices from sales of art work
- invoices from related services: putting up an exhibit, technical help, curator’s fee, commission on sales of works, etc.
For me though, the most important papers of all remain the pages of my agenda. I checked out several models before choosing an agenda that displays the week in two pages, with enough space to block in periods of an hour or more. An agenda is essential for writing in must-see events, important meetings, work obligations, cinq à septs, and family engagements; finally everything is listed together, side-by-side. This panoramic view of the week permits you to better manage your time and effort. One can therefore more easily negotiate and balance one’s energy amongst activities. Three studio sessions over here, an email session over there, an evening of love here and there: you can see what’s on the horizon. The agenda is a tool that is often undervalued by artists which serves to nicely frame our lives, that maps out time to paint, sculpt or reflect, where we enter the zone and there we are. Plus, we don’t forget the birthday of our loved ones, lost in our brushes, knives or big ideas; it keeps us grounded in our daily lives.
For a long time, I didn’t use an agenda and sailed along on a river of informal time, drifting from one occupation to another, without preparation or reflection. I realise today that this lack of vision was causing me a certain anxiety. I also learned that I could and should make time for things other than work or creation, like a family life and housework, without assuming that I could always be working, and working some more. I now negotiate, primarily with myself, my moments for work and my time reserved for other spheres. I know it sounds facile and simple in terms of advice, but if I was to reduce this to one dimension, I think time-management is the most important one. It takes a bit of discipline: being organised doesn’t happen all by itself. Its benefits are so great though, that I insist on insisting.
In getting organised and managing one’s time, sometimes one’s efforts and pleasures get managed as well. At first it’s natural to say yes to so many things that we can barely keep them in mind. We want to please, to accomplish and to prove ourselves as well, for sure. It is possible to say « No, my schedule is full ». We can put something off until later when we have a lot of engagements. We can also cut back a bit. We must evaluate what is negotiable as much for ourselves as for others. We have to appreciate the value of our work and the value of life as well. By calculating and quantifying one’s effort, we are able to better concentrate and work. It becomes possible to sustain an effort and then stop, returning to our daily activities, which can seem a breath of fresh air in our frenetic lives.
This negotiation with the self helps us to keep an equilibrium that benefits our practice and every sphere of life, really. The energy that we expend in other domains of activity is not in competition with the energy that we reserve for our artistic practice, so that when we devote our time and presence to everything else, this investment acts like a support to the artist inside, and that energy is returned to the artist - who must always compromise in conjunction with the other facets of life.
Finally, I would like to underscore that all our efforts are cumulative. We can sometimes feel a certain weight juggling all these dimensions and as a result feel like abandoning an artistic practice for good. Or contrarily, we give up everything else to concentrate on having a practice ... The middle path is the solution: to be able to arrive at a dialogue between our desire to create and our wish to live a normal life, and to feel good in all of that. One can ask, what is the point of all this? Little does it matter the degree to which we believe in our own practice or in our capacity to reconcile our passions with our daily lives, the two persist and grow by accumulation. Everything that we do with regards to our practice ultimately contributes to cultivating and growing it.