The creative life is a search for freedom — freedom for the wild bird inside that wants to sing. An artist, a writer, a musician, seeks to give that song a life of its own. To set it free. To let it make its own way in the world.

We seek to free ourselves of self-imposed limitations.

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us. Think that all of those who have succeeded, when they remember the difficulties of their beginnings, cry with conviction: "Those were the good days." Because for most people: success = prison, and an artist should never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be: prisoner of himself, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation, prisoner of success, etc. Did not the Goncourts write that artists of the great age of Japanese art changed names many times during their careers? I like that: they wanted to safeguard their freedom.
- Henri Matisse from his book Jazz

Happiness is a good day's work. You put your heart and soul into your art and you put down your brush, your instrument, before fatigue sets in. Put down your brush looking forward to the next day's work, satisfied that you tried to illuminate the fog that surrounds us, however impossible that may be.

Artists are often happier before success than after. Even with the difficulties of the early days. The early days were free. After success, there is constant pressure to replay the old hits.  Mark Rothko talked about this toward the end of his life, when receiving an honorary degree from Yale:

 When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing: no galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet it was a golden time, for then we had nothing to loose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity and consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I will not venture to discuss.

 Dylan talked about the toll success took on him in a 1965 Playboy interview. Nat Hentoff asked him about the early years. Dylan responded:

The pressures were unbelievable. They were just something you can’t imagine unless you go through them yourself. It was important for me to come to the bottom of this legend thing, which has no reality at all. What’s important isn’t the legend, but the art, the work.

Here's another Dylan quote, this one from the documentary “No Direction Home.”

An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s AT somewhere. You always have to realize that you’re constantly in a state of becoming. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you’ll sort of be alright.  

In Patti Smith’s memoir of her early years as a poet and then songwriter in New York City (Just Kids), she talks about her relationship with Sam Sheppard. They wrote a play together.

When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in poetic language, I got cold feet. “I can’t do this,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”

 “Say anything,” he said. “You can’t make a mistake when you improvise.”

“What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?”

“You can’t,” he said. “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.”

In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life.

That’s one of the things I love about watercolor. It is about the flow. It is about the spirit of both the object and about the spirit of the water. If you get the detail wrong, it doesn’t matter. In fact, the best watercolors get the detail wrong. They are about emphasis. The emphasize what the artist thinks is deepest, most interesting, most important about the subject.

But that doesn’t mean that skill isn’t important. For a watercolor to pack a punch, so to speak, it needs to say the most with the least, to be rich in its’ simplicity. Just as music is about listening, watercolor, and all painting, is about perception.

Interviewer: How important is the fact that all three of you worked with Miles Davis?

Gary Peacock: (Laughs) It is a good question. We’ve talked about our experiences with Miles, and we all share one thing in common. We are very clear about how Miles’ way of playing and his way of listening made the difference. My biggest lesson from him is that this guy is really listening. It is really about listening.

That was a big influence on me. Also, we were talking about Ahmad Jamal. There have been two minimalists in my life in jazz that were really leaders. One was Ahmad Jamal and one was Miles Davis.

That impacts in a certain way. How can you say the most with the least? What can you say so that you only have to say it once? What can you say so that it is complete in itself? Not so that it is succinct but so that it is rich?
     - Gary Peacock, bass player for the Keith Jarrett Trio in an interview from the documentary Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation

See, jazz always had this thing, having your own sound so all sorts of people who maybe couldn't have made it in other arts -- they'd have their idiosyncrasies ironed out -- like if they were writers they'd not've made it 'cause they couldn't spell or punctuate or painting 'cause they couldn't draw a straight line. Spelling and straight-line stuff don't matter necessarily in jazz, so there's a whole bunch of guys whose stories and thoughts are not like anyone else's who wouldn't've had a chance to express all the ideas and shit they had inside them without jazz. Cats who in any other walk of life wouldn't've made it as bankers or plumbers even: in jazz they could be geniuses, without it they'd've been nothing. Jazz can see things, draw things out of people that painting or writing don't see.
                        - Geoff Dyer, but beautiful, a book about jazz

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For a description of our new e-journal, The Song Within, A Working Artist’s Journal, which is published most weekdays, visit here.