Idiosyncratic Personal Visions

My sticky notes from Making Art and Making a Living by Mason Currey: [This book is] a quasi-history of making art and making a living--of patrons, day jobs, side hustles, strategic marriages, petty theft, palace intrigue and other adventures in funding a creative life, featuring a variety of brilliant minds from the Renaissance to the present day. The painters Mark Rothko, Milton Avery, and Adolph Gottlieb were all supported by their wives. familiar trajectory of ... years of struggle and uncertainty, often alongside miserable attempts to pay the bills through jobs that continually impinge on their time, energy, and optimism--until, finally, commercial success, and with it, at last, money and the opportunity to make art full-time. the trade-offs [of working to pay the bills while trying to make art] are low pay, exhausting work, lack of stability, and a different kind of brain-drain, the kind that comes from continually performing labor that does not draw upon your intellectual…

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