When Creativity Feels Drained: A Comforting Guide for Working Artists
An artistic soul thrives on reflection, rest, and process—not metrics. This blog uses comforting quotes from artists of color to remind creatives that nurturing the artistic soul is essential to sustainable, meaningful work.
Raise your hand if you're an artist who has caught yourself applying the following lens of perceptions to your creative process or piece of art:
1) Valuing the final product over the creative process
2) Basing the success of your art on views, likes, comments, and impressions
3) Undervaluing your contributions because of idolizing and coveting another's path to success
4) Assuming what you will create will not gain the "reach" you feel it deserves or needs
5) The statement "Who needs another [fill in the blank with your creation] has run through your mind
6) Assuming a creative block or creative rest is time wasted on the journey accomplishing your goals
7) Assigning a time and place on when and where your work will take flight or become "viral."
Are you an Artistic Soul?
I get it because I've been there, and I come face-to-face with these questions weekly as a performing arts educator.
How am I supposed to ignite students' artistic abilities when I feel depleted and deprived of my ability to make a difference through my artistry?
Artists not only have to:
A) Get themselves together to work a job to pay bills.
B) house, feed, transport, clothe themselves or others,
We also have the task of researching our creative flow and creating a life that allows that flow to thrive.
We don't give our artists selves enough credit, as we don't just go through the motions of life.
What Makes an Artist Different (and Why It Matters)
Artists don’t simply move through life — we interpret it.
Artists innately:
See patterns and connections where others see separation
Hold a heightened relationship to the source, using creativity as a healing practice
Translate the hidden undercurrents of culture through movement, sound, image, and story
Approach each new project with a beginner’s mind — again and again
Accept that creating often means finding parts of ourselves while releasing others
This isn’t indulgent self-aggrandizement.
It’s a labor of love of the soul.
What Does Art Do for the Soul?
Sometimes, the most responsible thing an artist can do is receive.
Receive comfort.
Receive language.
Receive reminders from those who have walked this path before us.
Indulge in the comforting words of artists of color below, which should serve as a form of creative meditation:
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
-James Baldwin
Within each thing, you're creating, no matter how you feel like you're failing within that particular exercise or that particular framework of what you're working on… there's something in there that's opening something up in you.
-Carlos Murillo
Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.
-Maya Angelou
I'm not going to continue knocking on that old door that doesn't open for me. I'm going to create my own door and walk through that.
-Ava DuVernay
The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.
- Richard Wright
From Idea to Fruition: Nurturing the State That Makes Art Inevitable
From idea → execution → fruition, the artist’s mind is rarely idle, even when it appears still.
So perhaps the real question isn’t:
How can I make better work?
But instead:
How can I nurture the internal state that makes my work inevitable?
What if success lies in protecting the conditions that allow creativity to emerge at all?
If you’re seeking that state, return to language.
Return to rest.
Return to remembering that your art doesn’t need permission to exist.
Sometimes, that remembering is the work.