The Importance of Rest as an Artist

Greetings. It’s been a little bit, hasn’t it? That’s what inspired this post actually. I recently needed to slow things down due to life events and health. To allocate my time and energy so that I could get what needed to be done most done, while still prioritising rest and not overdoing it. It’s something I became very aware of as a young “spoonie” learning how to get through the day to day. Years later, it’s helped me be more aware of managing my creativity as a result too. Silver linings, I suppose?

Taking a moment to slow things down, to enter a wintering season of taking care of myself, is one of the most helpful parts in preventing burnout artistically for me. Yet it also seems to be one of the hardest things to do. Since it’s been on my mind and relevant to me lately, I thought I’d share my own thoughts and experiences on the importance of rest as an artist and the different things that sustain creativity sustainably. I share it in the hopes it gives another viewpoint to creativity that’s either interesting or helpful in some way.

A small tortoiseshell butterfly I spotted resting on a thistle in a wildflower meadow.

Haunted by the optimisation ghost?

Are you haunted by the art ghost? I’m not talking about the artistic muse here. I’m talking about that hustle culture spectre that has formed quite the banshee screech to artist’s ears in recent years. A chorus of productivity-perfection and hyper-optimisation. One that can feel so haunting that it starts to seem real enough to influence our actions and how we should feel about them.

If you have somehow escaped its song, here are a few common melodies:

Hustle culture, and meeting quotas presented by other people. Social media schedule recommendations that change every update. Polished artistic ideals posted online, with most of the backstory context unknown. Why aren’t you already like the polished version of them immediately? They must be drawing every second of every day, so that’s how you should be spending your time. You aren’t? Then you aren’t a real artist like they are. That’s the only way to get good that exists. Short clips that edit out weeks or months of work to present something as a 15 second effort. Consume 100 of those in a row until your brain feels fuzzy. Fit into this circle-shaped hole of what perfect optimisation as an artist should look like. You don’t fit? Too bad. Now do all of those things at once, please and thank you.

You get the idea. Those are just a few I hear haunting art friends and those I follow, or things I have come across myself. Any of these and more can combine and compound into harmful motivations and artistic guilt. Tying the artist identity to output, to post count, to hours drawing per day, and so on. Then even more tragically: tying self worth to that as well.

Dalby forest lakeside.

Art isn’t just raw output

The thing is… being an artist is more than just raw output. That’s either incredibly obvious or completely blindsiding.

Creativity is a weird ephemeral thing. It seems to have shared traits among artists, yet also can be incredibly unique to an individual. In a room full of artists, each part of how I experience creativity would resonate with different people. Some parts wouldn’t resonate with anyone other than me. There would also be parts of creativity that artists in that room experience that I do not.

Trying to smush creativity into a factory-standard mould and expecting it to perform like that with perfect consistency forever is simply not sustainable for the vast majority of people.

To me there is so much more than just the raw output. Without recognising all of those moving parts, without all of those gears working together, the machine would eventually break. I constantly discover and rediscover what that looks like for me, but here are a few elements:

• feeding my interests

  • Reading books, listening to music, watching shows, etc. all feed into my inspiration. For example, while I’ve been under the weather I read The Wind and the Wild by Emily McCosh and watched The Prisoner of Beauty. Both made me contemplate what I like in story-writing, particularly with character relationships, and made me excited to get back to my own projects.

  • A balance of creative input and creative output, however that may ebb and flow, is a lived reminder that I am not a printing machine without heart or soul. Life can be so much more exciting than that, and who wants to turn creativity into a mechanical factory machine? I certainly don’t.

• active thinking time

  • The time spent thinking between actually drawing or painting can still very much be considered actively creating. While I am waiting for a layer to dry, I am thinking about things like what effect that layer had, what I need to mix next, what I need to apply next, whether to adjust something, and so on. It doesn’t matter if I am sat in my chair, walking away to get clean painting water or a cup of tea, or doing a couple squats and hand stretches on the other side of the room. Even if I need to rest my eyes, I may end up actively thinking and planning the painting while laying down with my eyes closed.

• passive/subconscious thinking time

  • Sometimes when faced with a creative problem, a chunk of time spent away from actively working or thinking about an art piece ends up unlocking the answer. The mind seems to subconsciously keep whirring away at the problem, and comes up with a solution while you’re doing something else. This ties into my points on living life, taking a break, and feeding my interests. Those are often the times when solutions will pop-up and then I know what to do with the art during my next painting session.

• turning off the noise

  • Being in a relaxed state without distractions can offer the opportunity for new ideas to flow in (ever wonder why ideas only come to you when you’re trying to sleep or are in the shower?).

  • This can involve all sorts of different methods. You find that a particular amount of time staring at the wall, ceiling, or up at the sky helps? Then it helps.

• living life

  • A source of inspiration and experiences to use in creativity later (e.g. moments while travelling, interactions while playing dungeons and dragons, conversations you have with a friend by a lakeside, etc.)

  • Provides me with the opportunity to rest, take a break, passively think, etc.

  • Helps maintain other aspects of my life so that I am in a balanced state to create (e.g. socialising, exercising, etc.). Touch grass, as they say.

• resting and recovering

  • Resting the body and mind before it crashes and burns. By taking care of myself when I notice to early on, I often avoid it turning into burnout or another larger problem that takes longer to recover from.

The part I want to draw attention to the most though is that when to do each of those things and how much to do them isn’t standardised. Doing any of them too much can also lead to an imbalance. Staring at the wall may lead to new ideas, but what if you never end up picking up the pencil at all afterwards. The same goes for too much focus on forcing output without considering the other factors involved.

An interesting tree I spotted while walking through the forest.

Flowing with the tides

By taking care of myself through the past few weeks, I’m exiting the other end with all sorts of ideas to bring to life or continue. That should hopefully be evident by the fact that my first post back is chonky. I’m excited to share some of the creative projects I’ll be doing over autumn and into winter with you all.

It has involved some sacrifice and compromise though, I will be honest. I was seriously considering joining a drawing challenge this October, and had my eye on Drawtober in particular. After some reflection and reality-checking myself though I’ve decided it isn’t what’s in my best interests right now. I would rather focus that time and energy on my own projects, and use the spirit of the season to fuel those instead. Plus, jumping straight into juggling a myriad of tasks while life is still life-ing is probably not the smartest decision I could make. Imagine managing my wellbeing for weeks only to crash by doing too much at once afterwards. How poetically tragic.

And totally a lesson I learnt as an early spoonie. Repeatedly.

One of my current sketchbooks and my thin pencil case I like to use to make myself limit my tool choices.

Anyway, as lovely as it has been to catch up with you all I must away to sketchbook land. See you on the other side of creating.