24 Hours In The Creative Life
In our 2022 Culture issue, out April 24, T followed a group of artists — musicians, chefs, designers, writers and others — throughout the course of a day, exploring the intimate moments of their lives that contribute, in ways small and large, to their creative process.
Every creative person knows that inspiration is everywhere, and yet the question What inspires you? can be both dull and impossible to answer. Inspiration, the alchemy by which an idea makes it from the mind to the page (or canvas or potter’s wheel or dress form), is often inarticulable or somehow unsatisfying. What feels so clear can, once spoken, sound tinny or fragile or banal. It’s why, I often feel, artists find not only solace but hope in hearing about other artists’ processes instead — what do they do, these other people, to make art happen? How do they create? What might their struggles illuminate about our own?
This issue is dedicated to living a creative life, which is something that all of us, whether self-proclaimed artists or not, have available to us. We asked people across ages, genders, races and mediums to explain how they create and, as important, why they create. Over the last two years, many of us who were fortunate enough to have somewhere clean
and safe to live concluded that one of the great pleasures of life is making things: be it bread, furniture or clothing. Pleasure is, naturally, one reason why, but there are others, too, some of them inexplicable.
The 34 people profiled in this issue are testament to not only the diversity of art but the diversity of artistic experience. Some I know personally — they are close friends (the architect Daniel Romualdez, the fashion designer Daniel Roseberry), collaborators (the theater director Ivo van Hove) or former colleagues (the playwright Mona Mansour) — but I consider all of them teachers: They are proof that, many times, the best work is made while doing things that don’t look like work at all. Art is created in front of the easel, but it’s just as often made while gardening or waiting for the subway or sitting on a park bench. Art happens in the day’s liminal moments, the times when we’re able to forget, for a few minutes or hours, the self-consciousness of creation and let our minds drift. ( … )