How Long Does It Take (to make a work of art)?

As always, these mini-essays are admonitions, warnings, and encouragements to myself, to help me when the difficulties of the work seem overwhelming or when I get inflated with too

hopeful fantasies. If any of them are of use to you, the reader, so much the better.

First, an appreciation. The one useful thing I have read about time comes from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. He wrote, in the midst of some encouraging observations: “Time does not matter.” That's all an artist needs to know about time.

A short answer to “how long?” is “ten years.” Allow that and realize that “ten years” is simply shorthand for “as long as it takes,” and then work as though time does not exist any more for you as an artist than it will for the thing you are making.

Difficulties, uncertainties, formal and material problems, doubts about oneself and one's abilities, discouragements, lack of progress, any sense of urgency, a premature completion, and all the other conditions of self and work that will arise . . . all are answered by this indifference to time.

You are not going to have any other eternity or any other heaven than this. You are a fool to be impatient or to think that time matters.

Only the work matters. If you are working for something else [for money, acceptance, fame, some foolish idea of immortality or of being remembered] your art will be maimed. It will not be the best thing you are capable of. If you keep on that way you will drop dead with your real work undone.

So ask yourself, over and over: “Is it good enough?” Not good enough to attract money or recognition or love or any of the things you might desire, but good enough to fully realize your sensibilities. In isolation from everything else and from everyone, is it good enough? Without any other result or reward than seeing the thing itself, is it good enough? Is it as good as you can make it? Is it as good as you could make it if you had forever?

bruce macadam, 2022

Index

How Long Does It Take (to make a work of art)?

What Is (artistic) Beauty Worth?

Why "Dying King"

Help!

"Dying King"

Shape Matters

2D Dialogue

A Note on 2D Sculpture

An Idea About Art as Separate

An Idea About What Visual Art Is

How to See Visual Art

What Sculpture Offers

Seeing Sculpture

What is (Artistic) Beauty Worth?

Beauty surrounds us, but requires our conscious attention to realize that it matters. It is no matter of prettiness, or decoration, or entertainment, but of creating a new condition of how it feels to be alive. It changes our experience of ourselves and of the world, but only if we make a conscious effort can beauty take such an effective place in our lives..

Beauty in the visual arts is a particular sort of beauty that may require decades for an artist to achieve and a deliberate effort for anyone to see. Does making a beautiful thing, so easily ignored, matter? Is such beauty worth achieving? It is worth seeing? I am still considering a question I first asked sixty years ago, at the start of my career: “Can I be an artist in a world going to hell?” Is it worth a life to try to make art?

It seems obvious to value what a good doctor does, or a good farmer, or any of those who provide for our needs and ameliorate our suffering. Where does an artist stand in this struggle for the well-being of our species?

I am a sculptor. My guiding purpose is stated simply: “to make something beautiful.” So I ask: “What is beauty worth?” “What is my purpose worth?” In a world in which pain, suffering, and loss are inevitable, what is any art worth?

Shall we humans make art? Shall we try to see art? Interestingly, the answer to this, for the past 30,000 years and more, has been “yes”: perhaps the most resounding “yes” in the history of our species. Who would need to question our tendency to join our ancestors in making and seeing this most durable of human accomplishments?

Thoreau went to the woods to discover for himself what life is, to find out and face life's characteristics in his own way. Each of us has to undertake or avoid this same challenge. We have to go somewhere, to do something, and to end up with some sense of what life is. Thoreau went to the woods: an artist might go to their studio to undertake the same daunting task. For the artist, the task is to make a thing that is their way of creating meaning.

The thing the artist makes, the new object, appears between us and the universe we knew before. Our universe changes. The feeling of being conscious changes in a way free of the vagaries of individuality. Vision, filled with color, light, and shape, and empty of sound, concept, memory, fantasy, and all the other distracting clutter of the busy mind, taps into deeper and sustained cords of feeling.

A beautiful thing means more than we can understand or explain. It may stop us in our tracks, shake us awake, and leave us newly uncluttered and more at home in the world.

Beauty will attract our attention and stop our restlessness. It unites us with something outside ourselves. From the universe of objects an object appears that fulfills our visual desire. The friction between ourselves and the world is eased.

Creating something beautiful is a significant accomplishment. There is no reason to expect this to take less than a lifetime. Time (as Rilke wrote) does not matter. The artist can never see far ahead, and has to risk every hope of success to find out where their path goes. Before it is finished, the artist cannot know how a new thing will look or how it will feel to see it. A work of art is not the expression of something that existed before: the object and the feeling are new.

It may be worth noticing. It may be beautiful.