The Big Art is Our Life - M.C. Richards

“Chekhov advised, ‘If you want to work on your art, work on your life.’ That’s another way of saying that in order to have self-expression, we must first have a self to express…
The process of identifying a self inevitably involves loss as well as gain. We discover our boundaries, and those boundaries by definition separate us from our fellows. As we clarify our perceptions, we lose our misconceptions. As we eliminate ambiguity, we lose illusion as well. We arrive at clarity, and clarity creates change…
People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.
As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We maybe enmeshed but we are not encountered.
Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self expression. We become original because we become specific: an origin from which work flows.” – Julia Cameron, The Artists Way