Making Art and Making a Living

Many of us are drawn to a life in the arts but daunted by how to balance that ambition with the very real need to pay rent and put food on the table. It is impossible to become an accomplished painter, composer, or novelist without spending time experimenting, making false starts, absorbing criticism, reading, talking, and moping about the house. All this time must be purchased, one way or another. Is the history of art and ideas just a history of rich kids?

The answer, of course, is no. William Carlos Williams was a family doctor. Franz Kafka was an insurance man, as were Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens. Grace Hartigan temped. James Joyce mooched off his brother; Christopher Isherwood ingratiated himself with a wealthy uncle. Virginia Woolf and Louisa May Alcott were determined to make their writing pay no matter what. And their material circumstances had an impact on all of their creative outputs.

From family money to jobs to colorful schemes, Mason Currey, author of the acclaimed Daily Rituals, explores both the well-worn and unlikely paths forward for the up-and-coming artist. Making Art and Making a Living is an entertaining and thought-provoking examination of the collision of creative ambitions with real-world necessities and of the messy, glorious, torturous compromises that gifted individuals have patched together when facing the eternal dilemma of an artistic life.

Mason Currey is the author of the Daily Rituals books—Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (2013) and Daily Rituals: Women at Work (2019)—featuring brief profiles of the day-to-day work habits of more than 300 brilliant minds. He has worked as the managing editor of Metropolis, the executive editor of Print, and a senior editor at Core77, and his freelance writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Slate. Currey lives in Los Angeles and writes Subtle Maneuvers, a twice-monthly newsletter on the creative process.