About doing the common thing uncommonly well

Or: who gets to call themselves an artist, anyway?

Honestly, I find those daily thoughts on the Underground extremely twee and irritating. I am not, in general, a miserable commuter—I blast something cheery and nostalgic through my ears to modulate my mood—but neither is it the moment when I want to be force-fed inspiration. Though it’s a matter of record that I’m not too great at being inspired even when I think I want to be.

Anyway, the other day I schlepped to Angel to see Kinds of Kindness at the crumbling Screen on the Green. There, by the escalators, scribbled in dry wipe were words I later discovered were attributed to John D. Rockefeller, Jr: “The secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well.”

My pattern-matching ADHD squirrel brain immediately chucked this in the same pot as some thoughts that have been simmering for a few weeks now. I’ve had three separate conversations over that time about the nature of artistry. More specifically: who gets to call themselves an artist?

It started, I guess, while I was having my fourth tattoo. (Really, did anyone believe I was going to stop at three? I hadn’t even convinced myself.) It’s a feather, or more specifically a quill. Because in the past couple of years I’ve finally been happy to describe myself as a ‘writer’. Something I struggled to do long after writing became a significant part of my job—and years after I started writing for myself and others in blogs, review sites, the ‘fiction’ folder of my laptop, and all that.

“I get it,” said Nick, as he hunched over my arm and glided his needle-pen around a fiddly curve. “I’ve only recently felt a bit more comfortable calling myself an artist.” He said the word somewhat in inverted commas, almost with distaste—as if handling it with a pair of tongs and elbow-length rubber gloves.

I won’t speak for him and risk misrepresenting his elaboration on this theme (nor do I remember his thoughts that clearly; I was being stabbed at the time, and while I actively enjoy the hot-scratch-twinge, it is quite distracting). But the gist of our conversation was: is skill the same as artistry? What’s the difference between an artist and a really good technician? A craftsperson? Where’s the line?

I picked it up at home a couple of days later with Ash, since he’s a graphic designer. By nature that’s a job that—like mine—necessarily combines your own creative nous with someone else’s preferences or vision. There are often copious restrictions. In fact, you tend to get better results when there are brand guidelines, a tone of voice etc. Within those confines, creative but constrained, can we still call ourselves artists?

Ash conceded that the day job had probably leached the energy and inclination out of him to actually create stuff for himself. He can illustrate but, other than in the header of his portfolio, rarely talks about himself as an illustrator. I’m probably putting words in his mouth, and definitely projecting, but I got the sense he’s still looking for permission from some external authority to lay claim to a skill he doesn’t feel is his bread and butter.

And me: I tend to specify what kind of writer I am. I’m a business writer. Or a copywriter (not the billboard type, though I did that too, once; even though it only ran in Canada, I promise the campaign was real and not a made-up girlfriend who goes to another school). I don’t just say ‘writer’ because then people think ‘author’, and I’m not that, although I’ve written a shit tonne of—sometimes bad, largely competent, occasionally brilliant but incomplete—unpublished fiction. And it’s the unpublished bit that gives me pause—but also how I tend to feel about the work itself.

I don’t think I’ll ever write anything that’s going to set a trend, or change publishing. Here I feel like I have a distinct voice, and mostly I rather like it. And my best fiction is definitely the stuff where my voice comes through—in that, yes, there’s artistry. But I’m not going to change or expand the form. I’m not James Mortmain (surely based on Joyce?) writing THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT until a new way of writing, of reading, emerges. And I’m not Dodie Smith, that meticulous psychologist, that photorealist painter of human foibles, that unparalleled first line merchant. At my best, I’m Topaz, drifting around naked on the hillside in my wellies: “three quarters practical kindness, one quarter spoof”.

From these two conversations, I decided that really when we say “artist”, we mean one of two things. One is the common sense of it: a person who does art, and can do it at a reasonably skilled level—better than the average person, probably. I’ll cop to that. The second is the one people struggling to see themselves as artists use: someone who’s making a distinct contribution; uniquely them, possibly transformative to the practice. No wonder few of us feel confident owning that.

I put that to my friend Alex, who is a social media strategist type, in the third conversation. He’s gloriously, practically, bluntly Argentinian and was basically “well, duh”, but nicely. His creative job is the least of the things that he constantly, almost compulsively produces: a podcast we made together (which he recorded, edited, branded and did 80% of the marketing for), a string of photography projects, an occasional newsletter. To him I think worrying about whether or not you get to call yourself an artist is secondary to having the time and space to simply create art. It’s a bit of a luxury concern, frankly.

And look, if you’re on Substack you’re probably a writer, or think of yourself as an aspiring writer, or you’re at least an enthusiastic reader with some opinions about whether what you’ve read is art or not. So tell me: when do we earn the right be writers? Are we artists? It feels like how we think about ourselves changes what we feel we have the right to do—and how we go about doing it. So it probably does matter (though not, in fact, as much as having the time and space to do it at all).