Motivation, Prague August 2022 Prague, August 27 degrees in the shadow of Višehrad there is a coffee shop with a quiet court lodged into the very fortifications of old. We talked with an artist friend about energy and motivation. Sometime as a young guy he found out that when motivation dwindles, he can just drink a glass of wine to get back into the flow again. Things turned sour when glasses became bottles and pills and the increase in motivation turned into a VIP invitation to the neverending party of death. This is a fascinating topic for me because I have been struggling with the topic of motivation for artistic goals for the better part of my life but never even could contemplate the choice of excess, because I have seen it’s nefarious effects early and keep far away from it as a consequence. It is also an ongoing concern for our artist friend because having survived this episode, he really has no choice but to find other ways of motivation and is actively seeking the advice of others. What he tells us is that collegues and gallerists and even collectors seem to be turning to hard drugs as a default and people cannot even understand how you could be an artist without recourse to this kind of substance. That shows me that art and creativity in general is introduced to us in a completely made up way as a wonderful human quality some select individuals possess and by which they bring all of humanity forward. I have for a very long time believed that the good artist knows what they are doing, is able to plan ahead every step and arrive at precisely the outcome they wanted, like royalty of discipline and gods of imagination. The more I know, the more I realize that the actual outcomes of art, and any creative endeavor, are much more stochastic and imprevisible, that the process is not natural at all and that the motivation to do it over and over again is something achieved with great effort, in particular over the long term. The discussion with our artist friend surprised me on multiple accounts. First, he told me, that the reason for his occasional glass of wine was actually to make the process of painting more fun for him. Who would imagine that an artist working with his own imagination and colors on canvas, could actually be bored by the whole process? Next he told me about how he writes down his thoughts from time to time. They are chaotic and unclear until he takes up a pen. With the pen everything becomes so focused and urging that he cannot even keep up with the speed of information flow from his brain and has to write in stenography. Sometimes he gets bored and to overcome these breaks, he writes in different handwriting, cursive, longscript and other visual alterations. I admire this level of control over his own creative process, which isn’t even his main way of expression! In fact if he would have just accepted that this is not only normal, but really already art on a very high level of efficiency in two disciplines, he could have avoided the dance with death and put out a sizable corpus of both writing and painting effortlessly and without much of a hassle, but that isn’t how the human psyche works now, is it? Right now I’m sitting in a train to Olomouc, writing these lines to myself and realizing that the difference between creative people and the others is that the former have found sufficiently many ways to trick themselves into being creative, while the latter haven’t. The question of genius, talent and good ideas doesn’t enter the discussion, because even if you have just one idea in your life you could vary it indefinitely and still make a valid contribution to humanity and I cannot imagine anybody to be uncapable of at least one idea in a lifetime. Learning art as an adult, as I have, you understand that what transforms your work from amateur to professional level is an understanding of your own habits. You put down certain melodies or motives more ofthen than others, you like certain tonecolors, you sound like the artists you most admire and so on, and step by step you let things go, integrate them better, in other words you make your work internally consistent, so that a work on it’s own, can be interpreted without reference to other artists or any other external factor than itself and the artist. This is what finding your style means, it is the artists unique voice we seem to cherish so much. Persistence, introspection and free recombination of whatever means of expression you use until you do things consistently in a certain way. I’m sitting in a train listening to some Skeler songs. I don’t have any story to tell you about this musician as I would have for Beethoven for example, about my destination or the seat I’m sitting in. If I would, some would readily identify with the situation, others would be off-put for my choices and the scene I’m in. But I feel incredibly motivated, motivated to write which I haven’t done regularly for 5 years. Why? The music for one, just appeals to me, I don’t question why, a couple of years back I wouldn’t even have conisdered it good music. Now, it makes me feel like a badass and it’s rhythms are particularly in sync with moving vehicles like this train car, it’s breathy nature I feel like, writing this very sentence, might be akin to the rhythm my own thoughts have, as I transform them into sentences. The train, comfortable, climatised, I’m alone and the gentle swinging makes me feel like I’m swimming through an ocean of thought, ideas streaming in from all sides. The feeling of traveling alone, for my own goals, feeling of freedom, purpose, feeling exceptional maybe, I don’t travel for others, do my thing. I’m writing on my cellphone, bluetooth keyboard, the files on a server, accessible from anywhere, again freedom, detachment, I feel light and unencumbered, the situation is elevated from everyday life, it is almost dreamlike, the realization that after some setup time I can really do whatever I want, where- and whenever I want. And so I write. I could do all these things without creating. I could learn languages for example or just travel and drink a beer everywhere I go. But without purpose, I would feel like a waste. Learning I would feel like a passive sufferer, captive. I don’t dream about success any more, but I do publish what I do, I identify with my work. There is no readily apparent use in it, other than a potential impact and the fact that some coherent logical structure did not exist before I set out on my voyage, and does now. Motivation is like the groove of a song. It exists, because of individual rhythmic impulses, meter, minuscule fluctuations in tonecolor, volume, the regularity of rimes. It is a sense of purpose achieved by all the things going on in the life of an artist at once, has to be reached by exposure over time, kept going, varied enough to avoid burnout.