"Daily Rituals: Women at Work," by Mason Currey

"What Women Artists Knew About Work" is the title of an article recently published in the Wall Street Journal. The piece was written by Mason Currey, the author of "Daily Rituals: How Artists Work", and more recently "Daily Rituals: Women at Work".

The article was so interesting that I decided to order his new book immediately.

Here is an excerpt from the newspaper piece that captured my interest:

"Don't be afraid of slumps. ... [I]t often turns out that these miserable slumps precede the most fertile periods of artistic or intellectual activity. The New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield was very familiar with this cycle. Despite much self-castigation over her non-writing days, she eventually realized they were just as important as the more conventionally productive ones. 'What happens as a rule,' she wrote in her journal, "is if I go on long enough I break through." The Abstract Expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler worked in periods of deep focus followed by stretches of labored, unsatisfactory painting, or nothing at all. 'I seem to start at day one again,' Frankenthaler said, adding that the feeling was 'agony'. But, gradually, these fallow periods would give way to a new phase of work.

"Never give up, no matter how long it takes. The Danish writer Isak Dinesen didn't start writing seriously until she was in her 40s, near the end of a failed venture at running a coffee plantation in Kenya. The sculptor Louise Nevelson exhibited her work for 25 years without making a sale; she got her big break shortly before turning 60. And the painter Alma Thomas didn't become a full-time artist until she retired from public-school teaching at age 68.

"These women were sustained by a belief in themselves and their gifts. But perhaps more important was the fact that they found real joy and satisfaction in the work itself, regardless of whether the outside world took notice. 'Nothing surpasses creative activity,' said the 19th-century pianist Clara Schumann, 'even if only for those hours of self-forgetfulness in which one breathes solely in the world of sound.'

"Even those who found their work quite trying would never seriously think of giving it up. The critic and novelist Susan Sontag is a good example: She wrote slowly and with painstaking effort, and yet at some level she found it all 'thrilling.' She liked to quote Noel Coward: 'Work is more fun than fun.'"