The truest thing I've ever read about making art

From the British painter and sculptor Maggi Hambling

Greetings! This is not going to be one of those newsletters where I grab your attention with the headline and then make you wait for the promised insight. Here it is: the truest thing I’ve ever read about making art—or writing, or making music, or pursuing any type of ambitious creative work—as emailed to me in 2017 by the British painter and sculptor Maggi Hambling:

It is not difficult to make a work of art, the difficulty lies in being in the right state to do it.

Yes! This may sound like a relatively humble, even unremarkable insight, but I think it contains a kernel of truth that explains almost everything about the art-making process, in particular why it can be so exhilarating and yet also so deeply frustrating and even, at times, literally impossible.

Maggi Hambling in her garden with Peggy. Photo by Julian Broad for Upstate Diary

When you’re “in the right state” for making a new work—i.e., when you’re in the particular right headspace for making that particular work—well, it’s like what people imagine being an artist or a writer or a musician is like, and how it’s depicted in cheesy movies: The work just comes flowing out of you, not exactly effortlessly but with a feeling of deep engagement and even a feeling of inevitability, like the work itself knows what it ought to be and you’re merely stewarding it along. But when you’re not in the right state for a given project, well, how do you get there?

Sometimes you may simply need to make a coffee, or go for a walk, or take a nap, or go to a museum, or have lunch with a friend, or lay on the couch and stare at the ceiling. Those are all ways to shift states, and they can be tremendously effective. But sometimes you need a deeper shift. Sometimes your project and your inner state just will not line up. And then the question is: Do you need to change projects? Or do you need to change yourself?

This is what I’ve been going through with my book project, and I think the answer is: both. Over the past couple years, I have had to substantially revise the idea itself—it turns out that what I originally proposed to do was wildly overambitious and also maybe not that compelling for the reader, whoops—and I have had to grow as a writer, which means growing as a human being, which is not something that happens easily or painlessly.

I can tell you more about that process in another issue, maybe. One thing I’ll say for now is that writing this newsletter has been a key part of that growth. I feel like I’ve gradually been finding my voice, or a more authentic version of my voice, which has been joyful but also frustrating in its own way—because for a long time the newsletter had this voice but the book did not, and it was not so obvious how to make the book have it. Voice isn’t something you can just inject into a piece of writing; it’s integral to the writing, and to the thinking behind it.

Anyway, I think I finally figured it out, and the writing is now flowing in a way it never has up to this point, and it feels amazing (and, god, I hope it continues like this). But it’s taken two-plus years to get here, and it’s taken stretches of bone-deep frustration like I’ve never experienced before.

So, not for the first time, I’d like to thank you all for reading and commenting on this newsletter—your engagement in this process has been crucial!

One last thing: The Maggi Hambling quote I started with—which she sent to me in an email interview for Daily Rituals: Women at Work, which also includes a long description of her idiosyncratic and fascinating daily routine (please consider ordering a copy if you want to read more!)—is actually a paraphrase of a quote from the Romanian-French sculptor Constantin Brancusi. The Brancusi version goes:

Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.

I like Hambling’s version better, and I also wanted an excuse to include that amazing photo of her in her garden with Peggy—though I also quite like this photo of Brancusi with his dog, Polaire:

Brancusi and Polaire in 1929. Photo: Ullstein Bild via Getty Images

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WHISTLER’S STATE OF MIND

The Hambling and Brancusi quotes also reminded me of a great exchange that Stanley Weintraub uses as the epigraph to his biography of the American expatriate artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler:

Whistler was, by all accounts, a colossal prick—but I like his line of thinking here. At least, this is what I tell myself when I feel uncomfortable asking folks to pay for this newsletter. It’s not the every-other-Monday email that’s worth 30 bucks a year; it’s the knowledge gained through two-plus decades of finding writing impossible and trying to figure out how to do it! (Still ongoing, of course.)

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