"How Much Time Did That Take?"
Our view of time and value influences how we think about creativity.
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A dark indigo cloud, a tiny line of hot pink.
That’s what I had on my mind the other day in a weekly creative workshop. The hour was devoted to autumn color palettes. I started things off with a writing prompt: what color feels significant to you right now?
We think of the quintessential autumn colors as various shades of reds, oranges, yellows, and browns. But that does always mean that’s how we feel the season.
There’s a blusteriness. A slowness that starts to sneak in. The hint of winter to come. But there’s a brightness too. The way the low angled afternoon sun casts a rainbow into the studio. The romance of lingering warm days. Will this one be the last?
Bouts of dark and moodiness but then doses of intense light that feel like they brighten up the rest. An energy that courses through, bubbles up. I happened to catch the visual version of that the other night at sunset—a heavy blue cloud covering the mountains, the bright pink of the setting sun peeking just slightly out at its top edge.
In my world, autumn is a time of big creative production. That outward, expansive nature that comes with summer transitions to something more internal. The studio calls, there’s work to be done. Not just work to be done, but work that I want to do. That’s the funny thing about pursuing an independent creative career where your path is your own. It’s assumed that you love every moment, that your passion that keeps you moving forward. Most often it’s the deadlines.
My deadline was getting the artwork for my annual calendar done and the files sent off to the printer. Ok ok, I still haven’t sent the files. Monday is a great day for that.
This has all meant a big push of art-making in the past month. Challenging myself to do something different, give myself permission to play and experiment and most importantly, the permission to make what I want. Again: it’s assumed that’s easy. I can assure you that it is not always like that.
In a sketchbook from back in January I made a little note to myself for a fun papercut to make as a creative reminder: “fuck around and find out.” Not in its usual aggressive warning way, but in a “mess around, see what happens, you might be surprised” kind of a way. A reminder that experimenting is an essential part of the process. That if you’re just messing around you’re still doing the “work.”
When we see a piece of art, read an essay, listen to a song, we don’t see that part. We don’t see the twisting path that the artist went on, only where they got to. We get a tiny sliver of what actually went into something.
A common question for artists is, “how much time did that take?”
I get it. If you aren’t engaged in the medium of the work you’re looking at, your brain is trying to wrap its mind around how something was made, how the person went about creating it, what it all entailed.
Trust me, I get this question a lot when someone is looking at my papercuts. Yes, you can argue that it’s a moment of reverence for the work, but the question makes me incredibly uncomfortable. Because when someone is looking at a piece of work, and you happen to sell that piece of work, it’s hard to not hear an undertone of “is this worth it?”
The values of capitalism are deeply entrenched, and our mind takes the time-is-money equation and quickly does some mental gymnastics with it so that we can come up with a price tag to put it into our social formula of if something has value or not. I know this, because despite my better judgement, I find myself doing it sometimes as well.
How much time does a piece of art take? “A lifetime,” is one answer. You got to this exact point today in which you made a piece of work that you would not have made on any other day previously. It took all of your experience, all of your mistakes, and all of your experiments to get to this one moment in time.
“A very long time,” is another answer, if you’re taking into consideration the entire creative process. When you write an essay, do you think about the time spent physically putting words down or do you also think about the walks, the time spent standing washing dishes, or the time right before bed when you’re turning questions and words over in your mind?
You could of course answer with the exact amount of time it took you to physically create the piece. As if you had set a stopwatch when you started and stopped it upon completion. This could be a few minutes, an hour, a year, depending on the project. But it would be entirely misleading, and again, only a sliver of the actual reality.
Art and money have a longstanding fraught relationship, and this time element is a part of it. We have industrialization to thank for that. As a culture that says it values art (up for debate, honestly) here is what happens when art and creativity is put into this time/value equation:
The art should take some time to make so that the artist can show that yes, it has value. “This took time, it was worth it!” You know, an appropriate amount of time.
But it shouldn’t take too little time, because that might make it seem like the production was easy or fun. “Doing something you enjoy? That sounds questionable. Best find the dreariness as soon as possible lest someone think you’re not a serious business person!”
And certainly it shouldn’t take too long which would make it feel indulgent or pointless in the grander scheme of things where there are More Important Things to do. “You spent how long making that?” What’s left unsaid: “you’re wasting your time.”
This equating of time with a monetary value system plants itself into our brain, and even when we’re mindful, it’s hard to extricate ourselves from it.
As Jenny O’Dell writes Saving Time, which I just started reading (“time to read all the books I want to read” is a topic for another essay),”I think the reason most people see time as money is not that they want to, but that they have to. This modern view of time can’t be extricated from the wage relationship, the necessity of selling your time, which, as common and unquestionable as it seems now, is as historically specific as any other method of valuing work and existence.”
When I am working on a papercut, there’s a little negative voice in my head that assures me that if something is complicated and detailed and takes a lot of time then it has more value. That same voice often pipes up if I make a simpler looking form or object, as well as if I am enjoying myself, to alert me to the fact that this certainly can’t have value. “Excuse me ma’am, you’re having fun? Who do you think you are?”
Society is highly skeptical of fun. It prefers the tortured artist trope. I actually think this is part of what being a working artist feel like a tiny bit of rebellion—when you do have fun, or when you’re messing around, or you’re doing some activity others would be hard-pressed to define as “work” you feel like you’re giving your finger to the entire system.
My friend
joked that if you have fun making your art then you should charge more. Or another way to look at it, “art is real and money is fake.” Point being: maybe we need to change the narrative.***
I wrote last weekend about layers. A piece of creative work—whether it’s a painting, a song, an essay, a meal—isn’t just one solid thing that was made with a concrete start and end point. It is an accumulation of layers. Layers of time, layers of thoughts, layers of experiments. But the layers are often invisible and indistinguishable, so we forget all that’s required to get there.
That’s how life is too, how we humans are shaped. Another day passes, we add a layer. Another book read, another layer. Another meal, another layer. Another sunset, another layer. Another birthday, another layer. We gradually build up over time, molded and formed by every experience, ever conversation, every tear, every laugh.
O’Dell writes, “Maybe ‘the point’ isn't to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, to be more alive in any given moment—a movement outward and across, rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track.”
Art and creativity reside in that place that feels alive. That place that feels vibrant. That place that connects us.
It isn’t linear, or even calculable, but it’s what makes us who we are. It’s a place of being, not just doing. It’s the hot pink line, the surge of energy and brightness.
We’d be lucky for that to take a lifetime.
-Anna
Pianist Colette Maze released her first album at the age of 84. She made her latest one at the age of 108. Essentially: a lifetime in the making. Here’s her album from 105.
“You are a hypocrite over and over. You love Annie Hall but you can barely stand to look at a painting by Picasso. You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction. In fact, you will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end. The way you consume art doesn't make you a bad person, or a good one. You'll have to find some other way to accomplish that.” - Claire Dederer (I am almost finished with her book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma and highly recommend)
Obsessed with Katja Lang’s work.
Thanks to my friend Jon for sending me
’s Audience Capture zine, which I can’t stop thinking about.
If you like this newsletter then you’ll probably love the weekend edition of Creative Fuel. It goes out every Saturday to paid subscribers, and includes some creative musings as well as a prompt. Plus you can look forward to December when I’ll be doing yet another edition of my digital advent calendar.
2024 CALENDAR PREORDERS
Yes, my 2024 postcard calendar is up for preorder! Every month turns into a postcard after the month is over. There’s also a 2024 Lunar Calendar. All preorders get free US shipping.
WORKSHOPS, RETREATS, AND CREATIVE MENTORING SESSIONS
Hannah Viano and I are going to do another retreat at Singla in Northern Norway in August 2024! Spots go on sale on November 1 at 9am PT. You can read more about it here, and if Northern Norway is a little too fall flung, we’re also going to do one closer to home in the Methow Valley, WA in October 2024.
There are just a couple of spots left in my virtual autumn papercutting workshop on October 17. I’ll be doing some more in November and December as well so keep your eyes peeled.
I’ve started doing some one-on-one creative mentoring sessions. I love this kind of work, and if it sounds like something you would be interested please consider signing up for a session.
Over at Creative Fuel Collective there are also some fun workshops and series like the seasonal writing group DIVE facilitated by
and a moody weather watercolor workshop with . There are our weekly free Wednesday sessions too. More info here.
I enjoy your writing so much. I'm not even sure how I came to follow your work, but I have been doing it for several years now. I am not an artist, but I always get something out of your letters anyway. They are like pausing and taking a deep breath somehow. Thank you for continuing to share your thoughts.
Hi Anna,
I am a new subscriber here and am really enjoying your newsletters. I read O'dell's first book How to Do Nothing and found it revelatory. So this is a good reminder to read her second. I've just finished Oliver Burkman's Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, which was like a gigantic exhale, a reminder that we are here for we do not know how long, and that as O'dell says, perhaps a "longer or more productive life" is not the point "but rather" one that is more alive in the present, "a movement outward and across." How long does art take, a lifetime indeed. I've finally given myself to art (writing) in the last year, at 51.
Your retreat in Norway sounds wonderful!