Recently, I've spent more time working around my art than actually making it, which probably sounds a bit like a contradiction.
After all, most people think creating art IS the job.
Yet behind every finished painting sits a long list of responsibilities that have nothing to do with holding a brush.
Exhibitions need applying for. Work needs photographing. Emails need answering. Social media needs updating. Collectors need responding to. Prints need packaging. Websites need maintaining.
All of these things are important and the challenge isn't deciding whether they deserve your attention. The challenge is finding enough time for all of them without sacrificing the thing that made them necessary in the first place.
It's easy to imagine the job of an artist simply being centred around creating, but the reality is running an art practice can feel less like one job and more like several happening simultaneously.
Some days you're a painter. Other days you're a photographer, writer, website manager, marketer, packer, administrator, accountant, courier and customer service department all rolled into one.
The balancing act
Over the last few months, I've found myself spending increasing amounts of time improving the foundations around my work. A large part of that was rebuilding my website — rewriting copy, restructuring pages, improving navigation and generally trying to create something that better reflected where my work is today.
None of this time was wasted. The website is stronger than it was before and as a result the structure of the business feels more organised. But every hour spent on these improvements is an hour that could be spent in the studio.
That's why balancing an art practice can be so frustrating because I know the jobs surrounding it are worthwhile, but they all rely on the same thing: new artwork.
Busy doesn’t always mean productive
Without time spent making art, the entire system begins to lose momentum, and the irony is that the activities designed to help an art career can only be sustained if new work continues to appear. The source of all of it remains the same: time spent making the work.
It's a strange tension because success as an artist requires more than simply making art work. People need a way to discover it. Opportunities need pursuing. Relationships need maintaining. None of those things happen by accident.
At the same time, it's surprisingly easy to spend so much time supporting the work that you start making less of it, and I suspect most artists have experienced this at some point.
You can spend an entire day being busy without moving the work itself forward. Tasks have been completed. Problems have been solved. Progress has been made, but none of those things replace the feeling of finishing a painting, developing a new idea or taking the work somewhere it wasn't before.
That doesn't mean the supporting tasks should be ignored. They're part of building a sustainable practice and, in many cases, they're just as necessary as the painting itself.
What matters is keeping them in proportion.
The challenge isn't always measured in hours.
Sometimes it's measured in attention.
Give a painting your full attention
Even when I'm in the studio, part of my mind can be elsewhere. Unfinished jobs and outstanding tasks have a habit of sitting quietly in the background, competing for space.
The result is the painting doesn't receive the full attention it deserves, and the opposite can happen too - While working through tasks, there's often a lingering feeling that I should be in the studio painting.
It's as though neither side is entirely satisfied. When you're painting, the business is waiting. When you're handling the business, the painting is waiting.
Left unchecked, the jobs around the artwork have a habit of expanding to fill every available gap.,, the painting, meanwhile, requires something less measurable - Time, attention, and the space to think.
It’s time for the next painting
Unlike most of the tasks surrounding an art practice, there isn't always an immediate result. A painting can take days, weeks or even months to resolve itself. Sometimes an afternoon in the studio produces a breakthrough. Sometimes it produces nothing obvious at all.
That's partly why the supporting tasks can be so tempting. They offer quick wins and visible progress, whereas the creative process often demands patience before anything meaningful emerges.
Websites CAN be redesigned, applications CAN be submitted and articles CAN be written but the difficulty comes when these things begin taking time away from the thing they're supposed to support, and at some point, every artist has to return to the same place.
The studio.
The blank canvas.
And the next painting.
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About Paul Kneen
I’m a UK contemporary abstract portrait artist exploring inner noise, quiet pressure and the emotional complexity of modern life through fragmented portraiture and bold colour. I create original paintings and limited edition prints, while also writing about art, exhibitions and the realities of being an artist today.
