An Artist Must Make Art

As anyone who knows me to any slight degree would know, I consider myself an artist. I have ever since I learned what the word meant as a small child. It’s the one constant in how I’ve identified throughout my life.

But sometimes I wonder if there’s a requirement for the identity. Someone who makes art – that’s a pretty easy definition for the term. But how frequently? Would someone be an artist if they made art once? Where do we draw the line, if anywhere?

I haven’t been making a great deal of art recently, since I got home and sort of gave up on the sketching every day thing I was doing while in Woodstock. I’ve done some things, but not in the way that gives me that false sense of productivity, like when I create artwork that I then share on social media. Instead, I’ve put my creative energy into a more personal project: putting together a creative birthday gift for my boyfriend. Naturally, I haven’t shared any of that on social media, and the art I’ve been doing surrounding that hasn’t felt “good enough” to post online, leading to a bit of an illusion of a dry patch.

Logically, I know that isn’t the case, but I can feel that I’ve fallen victim to the need for social media satisfaction to validate my creativity. I feel like I need to force myself to put more work in and create share-worthy things, or in the very least go back and create social media posts of the ones I haven’t been sharing to “catch up”.

Does any of this make sense or sound relatable to you? I don’t really have a conclusion to this post, which is very typical for these posts, and I just wanted to express the thoughts and feelings and hopefully get some insight in return from whomever reads this.