The Artist is Always Working

By Amy Lohr

I need time to roll around the ground to gentle, Spanish songs. I need to make loud noises. I need to jump up and down 100 times each morning because it's good for my lymphatic system and because why not? I need to text myself grocery lists and spontaneous poems that I'll never share with anyone. This is my way. This is my process. This is how I get by and how I flourish all at once. Surviving and thriving are just two ends of the same stick and I must do these things to traverse that delicate spectrum.

I can't help when it comes through me. I can try to summon it all day long; candles and binaural beats; journaling exercise and dance breaks. At the end of the day, I work for it. It does not work for me. This dance with creation is out of my control. I am its feminine counterpart. It leads me through tangos and waltzes and Irish jigs. It dazzles me beneath the disco ball and then it leaves me there in the middle of the dance floor. High for a while, then high and dry for even longer.

Is that just a part of its magic? The longing? The lack of control? My mother would never advise me to devote myself to a relationship in which I must be always available for the other to come and go as they please. But I can't help myself. I'm drunk in love. I’m addicted to the way creation touches my body and moves these hands and this heart in it's mystical rhythm.

While it's away, I mourn it; I prepare for it; I conjure it. Just when I've given into the mundane silence left in its wake, it ignites. Oh, how inconvenient it is. It keeps me up until 2 am, caressing keys and hitting return with my pinky finger. It stops me in the middle of the crosswalk and demands that I record the singular divinity of the woman in the orange dress with the orange hair as she flutters past me, her heels clicking against the hot summer pavement.

Upon creation, I struggle to resist the ego's call to step back and look it over and pat myself on the back and scheme just how to capture and caption it for exportation. Spirit whispers to me, “Why can't this just be our little secret? Don’t you see how sacred this moment is?”

Does the return really balance out the investment of my creative endeavors? My productivity programming wants to know. It all comes down to a matter of evaluation. How precious is a divine transmission? What price do you put on the ability of your fingertips to move as fast as your mind?

The process of creating art is a protest against productivity culture. Investment and return are nonlinear and incalculable.

Art is rarely efficient. There must be snack breaks and dance breaks and roll around the floor like a potato breaks. Days at a time, even weeks, go by and nothing is officially accomplished.

But the writer, the artist, the dancer; she is working at all times. She allows thoughts and forms to dance in her mind; chewing them over; sipping in miniature downloads at a time.

Yes, the artist is working at all times. When she’s out eating noodles with a new friend, cleaning the kitchen sink, listening to grandma tell the same story about her road trip through Mexico in 1943, kissing necks, sucking fingers, or re-watching teen dramas on YouTube way too late in the night, she is working.

It’s impossible to know how these things will meld together into art. It’s not the artist's job to know. It’s the artist’s job to participate in life and to witness the way it moves through her being with as much honesty as she can muster.