Advice on Art and Life

You don’t become an artist. You are one or you’re not.
If you are, you’re either creating or you’re not creating.
Both have their drawbacks; but while creating is frustrating, difficult, scary, occasionally exhilarating and often humiliating, not creating is to doubt one’s own reason for being.

The choice is clear, then; to stay alive the artist needs to create like the shark needs to swim.




We live in an age of irony – everyone is superior to or laughing at someone. We mistake it for sophistication, but it’s cowardice. It’s an unwillingness to stake one’s heart and mind on something for fear of appearing naive. Irony is lazy. Its point is that conviction is meaningless; its point is that there is no point. We think of it as edgy, but nothing is edgy if everyone’s doing it. The really revolutionary act is to create art that attempts to be redemptive, to stand for something, to be unrepentantly earnest. We need that art in this world. Go make it




from Gretchen Peters