Make Your Art No Matter What Quotes

“The confluence of factors that make life overwhelming will pass because change is inevitable.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“Sometimes life feels impossible; what do you then? Acceptance and forgiving yourself will help.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“I have to accept that this day, this month, this year is finite, and I cannot stuff a lifetime’s worth of adventure, love, and learning into it.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“I want to do far more in a day than is humanly possible. I think it’s my Gemini rising.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“Prioritize some time each week to be with yourself in this way, just as you make time to take care of your body, your home, your pets, your finances, and other people.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“Your art is already doing a lot for you. Can you consider the radical proposal that even if your work never pays you, it will still be a valuable and integral part of your life, for the rest of your life? What if your art gives you life and your employment pays for that life? Imagine a continuum; at one end is moneymaking work that has zero connection to your art practice, vision, and creative skill.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“Your creative practice is available anytime you want it, and it will be there for you on the other side of whatever is happening right now.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“My brain tells me that I can and should do everything in a day that is on my to-do list, which, as you might imagine, is quite long and varied.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“was the first time I understood that I am a person who tries to cram too much into a day.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“I want time for more of everything: sleep, reading, learning, swimming, cooking, friends, traveling, art events, volunteering, earning more degrees, meditating, talking in my pets’ voices with my wife.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“Full disclosure, this is the myth about time that haunts me most. I want thirty hours in my day, nine days in a week, and an extra month each year.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“It is a shock to your system to go from sixty-hour work weeks to open days, unfurling before you.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“It’s unrealistic to expect that a span of open time will be the panacea to one’s issues with time.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“Unstructured time creates the conditions to feel anxiety, fear, and grief that remain contained, managed, or stuffed down while a person lives their busy life in a familiar”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“It’s the in-between that is interesting for this exercise: what happens during that hourlong subway commute,”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“Setting a timer for every fifteen minutes”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“Carry a small notebook for seven days in which you record how you spend time, down to the fifteen-minute increment, starting with what time you woke up, what time you left your bed, and ending with what time you got into bed,”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“artists frequently are, struggle with the nagging thought, “I should be working.” Unplanned downtime becomes a stressor. Then”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“Our waking hours are supposed to be productive, and productivity should be monetized. Friends and clients tell me they feel like they should be doing something, all the time. Freelance”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“Time seems to elude us as we get absorbed in tasks or disappear into escapism.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“Artists have specific trials with time, which I will unpack. Some are from external forces, but many are internal, self-created.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“I find comfort and perspective in thinking about death every day as part of my spiritual interior.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“Our human lives, we were reminded, are minute fractions of specks in an incomprehensible time line.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“Time is a hostage to the powers of perception. —HAN SHAOGONG, A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“You make art because you’re an artist; you need this practice in your life to be a healthy, whole person. Even if your art never earns you money, you are an artist and need to continue making your work.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“HOW ARE YOU SPENDING YOUR DAYS? Do you know how you spend a typical week? Early on with a new client, I ask them to talk me through an average week, and most artists can’t do it. I can’t either, truthfully. I have to look at my online calendar to know what I was doing only yesterday. Though I know they might not be able to tell me,”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

“No feeling you have is bad, it just is. We have to feel our feelings, even the uncomfortable ones. There isn’t a permanent way around them; we can only move through them. As with our thoughts, when we learn to identify our feelings, our power over them can grow. Also like our thoughts, our feelings are real but they’re not all necessarily true. And no feeling is final. All feelings, like everything else, will pass and change.”
― Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles