Jackson Pollock said he was nature. He killed himself anyway by driving while drunk. Pollock, yet another tortured artist, could not enjoy his own success since he didn’t know the source of his art. He felt as if he were the middle man, a fraud in some respect, and unworthy of the appreciation that came his way during his lifetime.

Whether you love or hate his work, Pollock’s life is a lesson for all artists. If you are tortured when you are unknown, becoming known is the not the bromide you might envision—as Pollock proved to himself and to any other artist smart enough to see.

Being nature as Pollock proclaimed is a grand perspective that I am in tune with. Think about it. The great artist does not emulate nature; he adds to nature by contributing to the cosmic canvas. That is what a creator does. He works in the eye of the hurricane.

Who am I? Who are you?

I love the word threshold. There is a boundary between the true artist and a wannabe. This boundary is not the demarcation line between talent on one side and its absence on the other. It is talent plus self-motivation—an action term more described than exercised.

Where do you stand in relation to this dividing line? Can you have one foot on the stage and the other in the audience? Ouch—and I mean man. That would be a painful and pointless stretch.

The true artist as a creator has no boundaries. 

In Buddhism there is a concept known as Right Understanding, which involves an understanding of the Four Noble Truths, namely the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the ceasing of suffering and the truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering. 

For the ordinary person, life goes like this: He is constantly striving to attain something which he has not, and when he has attained it he is anxious about losing it; this is true not only of money but of position, power, and social advancement. You cannot win at this game of life with this attitude and perception. 

After many years of heeding a voice, a feeling really, only I could sense, I ultimately realized the muse, that goddess who encouraged me to swim upstream against the torrent of tradition and dogma, was in truth my intuition—not a construct of Greek mythology.

The Muses are, after all, vindictive deities. As the myths about them reveal, they avenge themselves without mercy on those who weary of their charms. 

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From my upcoming book on how to positively handle rejection:

As I’ve stated elsewhere in this book, the artist embodies both the protagonist and antagonist—he either gets it done or does himself in. It is an internal affair.

If we could see the artist’s life from how God might see it, we would witness the canvas in toto. We would get a clear construct of what is right and wrong action for the play to unfold in the hero’s favor. From such an omnipotent overhead point of view, we would observe the dead ends and the opportunities. In other words, when the artist rises beyond the box and any limitation in dimension of his life, he can see dispassionately and that invariably leads to right action.