From the Comment Magazine article On Discipline by Carey Wallace…
“The art world is full of talk: gossip, politics, and a smattering of actual ideas. But the question of artistic discipline, the central problem of a working artist’s life, is almost taboo, perhaps because the answers are at once so obvious and so daunting. Tellingly, the artists who do have strong habits—the writer you can never see on weekends, because she’s always tapping away at a new manuscript, the painter who disappears into her studio every other evening, despite working full-time hours—are the ones who are also carving out names for themselves in their respective fields.”
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“I thought of this as a simple commitment, something that could be fit into the context of any life, with enough discipline. I was shocked to discover how much it actually demanded. The problem is this: creation requires firing on all cylinders. If people carved out time on a Saturday morning, but were out till three on Friday night, the time was compromised. If they hadn’t been eating well, the time was compromised. If they were distracted by other pressing worries, the time was compromised. Part of an artist’s task is to shut out these distractions and listen only for the voice of their work, and no artist can survive without that species of discipline. But many of the problems the artists in the program faced were genuine, too visceral to be ignored. In fact, introducing discipline in one area seemed to exacerbate problems in the others. “When I push on one area,” one artist said, “the rest of my life seems to go crazy.”
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“There is no such thing, we discovered, as disciplining one corner of a life. There are only disciplined or undisciplined lives.”
