How do you manage to balance your creative life with your family commitments? I’ve been a ‘hobby’ painter for years, but since the first COVID lockdown, I have taken it way more seriously and have reached a point where it’s all I want to do. I’m genuinely thrilled by what is happening at the end of the brush, but I am increasingly aware of the cost of hours and hours spent in my shed rather than with my wife and son. My desire to create feels like a compulsion, and I’m struggling to work out whether it’s the purpose of my life or some kind of mental illness. I’m in my 50s and still have a real job. I’m realistic about the unlikelihood of ever being able to paint full-time. But I believe, as much as I believe in anything, that this is the real thing and is of value. I want to spend every hour I can exploring this world. Any thoughts you have would be very welcome.

Dear John,

Often questions come in to The Red Hand Files that I don’t feel I have the authority, expertise, or even understanding to address. Of course, this doesn’t always stop me from attempting to respond, but it does give me pause. I had no such trouble with your question, John. I completely identified with it, and I know how to answer it. I am an expert in these matters.

You have a wife, a son, a shed, and a creative compulsion – what could possibly go wrong? My office was your shed, it was separate from the house and I would spend most of my time there. The house felt like a well-established and settled place, while the office was a mysterious and magical realm, a place where I transformed into the person I always believed I was meant to be.

You brilliantly capture the sensation of being inside the breathless rush of the creative process, where time holds no sway and the whole world seems to crystallise into a written word or a stroke of paint. Compulsive and charged with a devilish energy, you feel in your very bones that this is what you were destined to do.

You wonder whether this is a mental illness. I believe it is. The artistic impulse is an exquisite derangement – like drugs, like love, like faith, like grief – a complete and full-force commandeering of the body and the heart. It is a kind of possession, a thrilling seduction, an enchantment, as the ink and paint flow and dance. So demonically exhilarating is this sensation that we think – “This must be the purpose of life!”

But, John, it is not. 

The creative urge is a gift not afforded to everyone, and those of us who possess it bear a responsibility to pursue that impulse wholeheartedly. However, there are other duties beyond those at the tip of your brush or nib of my pen – beautiful and sacrificial fidelities. You have committed to your wife and son to offer them more than just the crumbs of yourself, the dregs of what remains of you after a day with the devil in the shed. You are in service to your creative impulses – and by the same token to God – but you are also in service to the world as it presents itself, and to those entrusted to you. This is a point of honour.  It is with a hard-earned understanding, and the most profound regret, that I can tell you that no artistic endeavour, no matter how sublime it may appear, is worth denying your family or sacrificing those in your care.

My advice, John, is to cherish your wife and love your child with all your heart, and then go to your shed – in that order. I’m saving you a world of heartache, my friend. In the years to come, you will thank me.

Love, Nick

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