Quoting a chapter from Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch:

“In high school, I read Robert Henri’s book The Art Spirit, which prompted the idea of the art life. For me, living the art life meant a dedication to painting – a complete dedication to it, making everything else secondary.

That, I thought, is the only way you’re going to get in deep and discover things. So anything that distracts from that path of discovery is not part of the art life, in that way of thinking. Really, the art life means a freedom. And it seems, I think, a hair selfish. But it doesn’t have to be selfish; it just means that you need time.

Bushnell Keeler, the father of my friend Toby, always had this expression: ‘If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.’

And that’s basically true. You don’t just start painting. You have to sit for a while and get some kind of mental idea in order to go and make the right moves. And you need a whole bunch of materials at the ready. For example, you need to build framework stretchers for the canvas. It can take a long time just to prepare something to paint on. And then you go to work. The idea just needs to be enough to get you started, because, for me, whatever follows is a process of action and reaction. It’s always a process of building and then destroying. And then, out of this destruction, discovering a thing and building on it. Nature plays a huge part in it. Putting difficult materials together – like baking something in sunlight, or using one material that fights another material – causes its organic reaction. Then it’s a matter of sitting back and studying it and studying it; and suddenly, you find you’re leaping up out of your chair and going in and doing the next thing. That’s action and reaction.

But if you know that you’ve got to be somewhere in half an hour, there’s no way you can achieve that. So the art life means a freedom to have time for the good things to happen. There’s not always a lot of time for other things.”

Get the book, you want to read all of it.

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