’Tis the season.

Halloween.

Day of the dead.

Autumn leaves collapsing to the ground.

The season of death.
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Don’t worry, I’m not going to drag you down some morbid, dark alley.

Instead, let’s look at the bright side of death — as it applies to our creative lives.

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Death is part of the cycle of creation, the essential breakdown of the past into the raw materials of the future.

Every seven years, all the cells in our bodies die to be replaced by new ones.

Thriving cities bulldoze ancient neighborhoods to make way for future ways of living.

Farmers clear their fields, replant with new seeds and attend the spring.

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Every successful artist gives birth to thousands of ideas.

Most are dead on arrival.

We try something, it fails, and we cast it aside.

So we build on what we learned from that short-lived notion and build on its ashes.

When that, in turn, collapses, we stomp it down and climb astride the ruins to try again.

It’s a powerful process — if we let it happen.

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But too often, all this failure and destruction can leave us feeling hopeless, like a general surveying a smoldering, corpse-strewn battlefield. We despair that we will never win, that we have no talent, that we should give up and take an accounting course.

Or perhaps it’s not our willingness to work that dies. It’s our wild creative spirit.

We trade it for security. We sink into a particular way of making art that we have grown comfortable with. We stick with familiar subjects, the same old colors, worn brushes, and safe ideas that appear as comforting friends. We crank out canvases or drawings or illustrations or designs like a well-oiled machine — reliable, predictable and safe. We show them in the same venues to the same people. We fill endless Instagram pages with indistinguishable squares. We talk to the same people, reference the same artists, teach the same subjects at the same institutions, fall after fall after dreary fall.

And bit by bit, our imaginations, our courage, our willingness to take risks, our sense of adventure, they all shrivel and die.

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But, as we see each March when little heads poke out from furrowed fields, death is just a phase. If we are willing to reseed, to turn over the soil, life will come back.

We are never too dead to try new things.

Search out new materials, new friends, new experiments, new byways to take to refresh our adventure.

Think of old bind Matisse lying on his sick bed clutching scissors and construction paper.

Think of old bald Picasso grasping for pink and green crayons to make Self-portrait Facing Death.

Crippled Kahlo making a selfie in her iron corset.

Deaf, dizzy, delirious Goya painting himself in his doctor’s arms.

Despite the growing shadows of the final curtain, the greats were inspired to secure their immortality, to live on forever in daubs of paint and scraps of paper.
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Will we all make art on our deathbeds? I guess it’ll depend on hospital policy.

But we can make art today and tomorrow.

We can greet each day as if it were the first day of the rest of our lives.

Bury the regrets of the past.

Resurrect our imaginations.

Get out into the sunshine.

And play and play and play once more.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. Thanks to everyone who wrote to share their reasons for making art. I am still wading through all the wonderful responses and plan to write more about them soon.