Hello there! It's Jocelyn Mathewes from my studio in Appalachia. And today I’m sharing a bit about the invisible supports that go into my practice.
how i’ve made a living
Generally, I don’t talk much about what I do outside of art in this newsletter, but I’ve done a lot of things besides art to make a living. I’ve never made my living off of fine art, in spite of my best (now misguided) efforts to fulfill the strangely American dream of monetizing my creative work.
Right out of school, I did the full-time 9-to-5 thing. When parenthood came around, the economics of daycare didn’t make sense for our family. So I stayed home with the kids and freelanced all kinds of things—writing, social media marketing, graphic design, consulting, and more.
The flexibility of freelancing turned out to be pretty great (and also challenging) during the uncovering of my chronic illness and its peak of activity; I had flexibility. But I didn’t have a sense of stability.
As I went into remission (and my kids were older), I began to explore different employment opportunities. It took courage, because I didn’t know what my body was capable (or not capable of) anymore. I definitely tested my limits and had to make adjustments along way.
But the biggest surprise for me was that I really enjoyed having work besides artmaking to keep me occupied. Exercising different problem solving muscles helped me to bring those lessons back to my creative practice.
Also, money is pretty nice to have. Unlinking economic necessity from my creative practice has helped me enjoy the process more and understand which parts of my practice I need to keep for myself.
Turns out, I’m the type of artist for whom job stability actually fuels my creativity (in part because stability de-risks experimentation). What Austin Kleon has warned/written about is true: if you monetize your hobby, you have to find a new hobby. (Or as Emily McDowell has written, overachievement can lead to burnout, or worse.)
I like to talk openly about the structures around my creative practice, because it’s so easy to look at someone’s work and not see the invisible supports that go into carving out that time and space. So, if this has helped you, I’m thankful.
looking at the new year
At the end of 2023 I got wound up and excited about setting my goals for the next year. (For those notebook nerds out there, I tackle things in a modified bullet journal style on a quarterly basis.) But then I took an unexpected pause in January (due to illness). The slower pace felt so great I decided to keep going for awhile.
I spent the past few weeks quietly listening. It was hard to slow down—it felt “wrong.” It helped that I was recovering from being sick, which forced me to slow down and reprioritize. Being sick interefered with my sleep and gave me a strange sense of being out of time, which I enjoyed.
I want to lean into that feeling of liminal time, where dreams and reality flow in and out and I hold onto them loosely. It feels rich and full, a quiet readiness. I’m biding my time. I’m enjoying my time.
During this time, I had the chance to do a major purge of my supplies and make improvements to my bedroom workspace. I said goodbye to unused materials and items that were from adventures past that I have fond memories of, and that I had to remind myself still exist even if the stuff isn’t there. Cleaning my physical environment really helped my focus—clarity of space and clarity of thought.
The largest improvement to my bedroom studio was adding a dedicated library. Because I live in a rural area with a limited library system, books on speciality topics are hard to come. I've been collecting books and magazines for years, but they’ve been getting in the way of the storage for my materials for some time now.
Putting all these materials in one place has allowed me to see that in spite of my waxing and waning emotions about my practice (yup, I’m also the tortured artist type), I’ve been taking artmaking thing seriously for years.
Discarding old supplies meant I took stock of the processes I wanted to focus on. I also looked at my workflow with fresh eyes. One thing that struck me was how much I believe in sheer quantity as a means to getting at a result.
This is true! To some extent, you need to be an artist that produces a quantity of work (having lots of ideas guarantees that you’ll run into at least a few great ideas)! You learn by iterating and refining your process, and generating quantity helps you to iterate and refine faster.
Liminal time helped me reframe, so I can an experiment in a way so as to inform me, rather than just getting the dopamine hit of getting it done and checked off my list. If I’m not focused on thoughtful improvement, the benefits of additional hours or quantity of work won’t pay off.
This is tricky, because I’m trying to re-wire my brain and my way of working. For a long while the struggle was to just make work, but now I’m entering a period of refinement.
There's a tension and anxiety I feel in trying to trust into these refinements and diving into them will yield sustainability. But I know that leaning into the discomfort is the way to go.
If you’ve read this far, thank you—I’m diving back in to sharing more frequently, so I’ll see you soon.
xo,
jocelyn
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The timing of this is fantastic. I start a full time day job at a call center in two weeks after more than two years of trying and failing to make a decent living off of art. I'm not excited for it, but I am a little relieved at the promise of financial stability, being able to hopefully rebuild my dwindled savings and being able to work more on the art I WANT to make, not making things that I hope will sell or whatever. I'm also using this pre-day job period to just play around and work on whatever interests me, starting some things I can return to in the future when I have a better understanding of how to manage time and energy.
I've also completely reorganized my own studio space after the death of my chinchilla last year and moving his cage out, taking stock of what materials I have, and I think paying close attention to what I use versus what I don't and letting go of the latter is something I should do as well!
I didn’t even mention the financial stability, but I benefit from that as well. Both from my university job and Nathan’s job. I tried freelance theatre work for a while and it was not stable enough for me.