I often wonder whether I'm doing enough with my art. I tend to beat myself up for not spending more time writing songs and playing gigs, or writing stories and attending literary festivals, or practising my pencil strokes and attending more life drawing classes. These seem like the archetypal activities to engage in to better my music, my writing and my sketching respectively, so there's always a voice in the back of my head – often yelling, sometimes whispering – that I'm wasting time whenever I'm doing something that doesn't appear to contribute directly to improving my art.
Prominent as this voice may be, I recognise that as artists, we're humans first, with lives and pasts and goals and futures and dreams and day-to-day experiences, all of which we draw on in our art, so it seems counterintuitive to prioritise the pursuit of art and to practise relentlessly at the expense of living life. This is an internal conflict I've experienced for some time, one which I’d long been unable to resolve or articulate the solution to, until a few weeks ago, when, while listening to the What Now? podcast, the words came to me, courtesy of a story that the host, Trevor Noah recounted about an encounter with Chris Rock.
In this story, Trevor Noah talked about Chris Rock asking him how he was doing during an encounter. He responded by going into some detail about how he’d been going out gigging and doing stand-up every day, honing his craft, and how pleased he was to be keeping busy. But much to his surprise, Chris Rock told him that’s exactly what he shouldn’t be doing, that he was working too much, and that going out to do stand-up every day would make him a bad comedian because it would leave little or no room to live a life. To paraphrase Trevor Noah quoting Chris Rock: “Comedy is about what you experience when you're living life. If you're not living life, your comedy doesn't have life.”
This resonates so much because we could replace “comedy” in that quote with other forms of art, be it music, writing, sketching, and more, and the statement would hold. Artists draw on their lived experiences, their observations and interpretations of the world, in addition to all the other fictional worlds they’ve experienced through their creations and that of other artists. And what better way to experience and appreciate these worlds than to live life to the fullest?
This is all to say that while there’s a place for relentless practice and the persistent pursuit of our artistic goals and dreams, it behoves us as artists to live life because if I may borrow the words to one of my favourite songs, life’s for the living, and if that’s not a good enough reason, we should do it because living life breathes life into our art. So, while we can all accept that art enriches our lives, perhaps it's worth remembering that the relationship goes both ways, which is to say that life enriches art.
P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.