Making Art and Making a Living - by Mason Currey (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"Mason Currey is the undisputed master of finding, in the messy lives of great artists and thinkers throughout time, deeply human lessons about cultivating meaning in our current age." --Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of Slow Productivity and Deep Work

Daily Rituals author Mason Currey weaves together delightful, illuminating stories and reflections about how famous artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers throughout history have managed to successfully (or not) support a creative life.

Many of us are drawn to a life in the arts but daunted by how to balance that ambition with the very real need to pay rent and put food on the table. It is impossible to become an accomplished painter, composer, or novelist without spending time experimenting, making false starts, absorbing criticism, reading, talking, and moping about the house. All this time must be purchased, one way or another. Is the history of art and ideas just a history of rich kids?

The answer, of course, is no. William Carlos Williams was a family doctor. Franz Kafka was an insurance man, as were Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens. Grace Hartigan temped. James Joyce mooched off his brother; Christopher Isherwood ingratiated himself with a wealthy uncle. Virginia Woolf and Louisa May Alcott were determined to make their writing pay no matter what. And their material circumstances had an impact on all of their creative outputs.

From family money to jobs to colorful schemes, Mason Currey, author of the acclaimed Daily Rituals, explores both the well-worn and unlikely paths forward for the up-and-coming artist. Making Art and Making a Living is an entertaining and thought-provoking examination of the collision of creative ambitions with real-world necessities and of the messy, glorious, torturous compromises that gifted individuals have patched together when facing the eternal dilemma of an artistic life.

Review Quotes

"A riveting, incisive, and instructive book."
--Suleika Jaouad, New York Times bestselling author of Between Two Kingdoms and The Book of Alchemy

"By telling the stories of creative people in the past, Mason Currey gives readers a wider range of possibilities for the future. I always find much to steal from his books."
--Austin Kleon, New York Times bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist

"Mason Currey is the undisputed master of finding, in the messy lives of great artists and thinkers throughout time, deeply human lessons about cultivating meaning in our current age."
--Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of Slow Productivity and Deep Work

"A wonderfully readable, anecdote-filled tour of the inventive and sometimes eyebrow-raising ways artists through history have sought to transcend the everyday while also paying the bills. Mason Currey never tells the reader what to do--creativity is too personal for that--but there's vast inspiration, and consolation, in these pages."
--Oliver Burkeman, New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks

"A delicious peek at the rich husbands, family money, business schemes, and desk jobs that really filled famous artists' bank accounts, this book is a balm for anyone who has ever fretted that they are not a 'real' artist because they don't pay their bills with their art."
--Ann Friedman, co-author of Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close

"An astute assemblage of biographical sketches highlights how practical circumstances can complicate artistic ambition [...] as an invitation to create--to push up against limits, to squeeze time from the margins of the day, and to live on sardines and crusts of bread if necessary--Currey's case studies may well spark the artistically inclined reader to attend more dutifully to their life's calling. Thought-provoking, interwoven profiles celebrate the creative drive in context." -Kirkus Reviews

"I didn't think Mason Currey could top Daily Rituals--but with his thorough research and his lively rendering of great artists and their lives, he's proved me wrong. Making Art and Making a Living is a riveting, incisive, and instructive book that illuminates the material conditions that creators across the ages have lived through, which reveals the depth of their commitment to the artistic vocation. From Petrarch to Van Gogh to contemporary writers crowd-funding their work on the Internet, Currey shows the effort required to realize one's talent--making those feats of creation all the more inspiring. Come for the lessons in enduring for the sake of one's art. Stay for the strange and delightful anecdotes, the confessional letters, and the gossipy journal entries that feel like the best kind of eavesdropping."
--Suleika Jaouad, New York Times bestselling author of Between Two Kingdoms and The Book of Alchemy

About the Author

Mason Currey is the author of the Daily Rituals books--Daily Rituals: How Artists Work and Daily Rituals: Women at Work--featuring brief profiles of the day-to-day work habits of more than three hundred brilliant minds. He has worked as the managing editor of Metropolis, the executive editor of Print, and a senior editor at Core77, and his freelance writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate. Currey lives in Los Angeles and writes Subtle Maneuvers, a twice-monthly newsletter on the creative process.