In his book, The Creative Act, A Way of Being, Rick Rubin suggests opening up a book to random page, reading a sentence and seeing what information we can take from it. And so that's exactly what I'm doing in this episode. We're going to talk about the practice of living as an artist, the rules about rules that artists learn. The beginners benefit success gems and how to protect your momentum and avoid stagnation, and also how to bust out of that box and be your own niche. I'm so excited about this episode and so happy that you're here. Please enjoy this unconventional book review on episode 9, Lessons for Liberated Artists from Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being.

Hey, artist friend. This is Mariana Durst from the Liberated Artist Podcast, a space for unvarnished conversations about selling art online from a place of artistry, integrity, and courage. So whether you've got yellow ochre under your fingernails or clay dust on your jeans, I'll be your go-to guide as you bridge the gap between art and entrepreneurship. Your art isn't meant to stay stacked against the studio walls. Ready to walk this path together? Let's get started.

Hey, liberated artist. Oh my gosh. Well, today I'm running a little experiment and you are coming with me. I wanted to do kind of like a book review episode of this book that I am totally obsessed with. I'm so obsessed with it that I haven't finished it even though I bought it months and months ago when it came out. And I haven't finished it because I'm so in love with it and I just don't want it to end. So I read it very slowly and I let each page kind of simmer and integrate. And I just let myself absorb all the goodness that it has to offer.

The book is called The Creative Act, A Way of Being. The author is Rick Rubin, who I understand is a record producer, but there might be a lot more to his title. But Rick has created this wonderful book. And in one of the first pages that I read, he suggests opening up a page of any book, reading a line, and seeing if we can make any connections with what we're reading, maybe connections that inspire our work or give us direction. And I thought that might be a really interesting format for today's review.

So in today's episode, I'm going to be randomly opening this book, and reading of a few lines, maybe a paragraph, whatever makes sense, and seeing if there's anything that we can apply to our journey as liberated artists. On episode three, I talked about why artists make the best entrepreneurs. And even though this book is about being a creative and it applies to so many other creative fields, not just fine arts, painting, sculpting, etc., there is such a blurred line between the two that I can almost start recommending it as a book about marketing and business. I know it's kind of a stretch. Maybe maybe it is. I don't know. But I'm in this world my brain is so sensitive and so finely tuned to this idea of art and the artistic process being so in alignment with the entrepreneur process that maybe I'm just reading so much into it. But I think we're gonna have a lot of fun today.

All right, so ready for the first line? Let's go. Okay, I opened up to page number 47. And at the very top, it says, living life as an artist is a practice. You're either engaging in the practice or you're not. Okay. All right, Rick Rubin, that's a very good piece of wisdom that you're sharing with us. So let's discuss let's talk about what it means to be in this life and going through our journey. I mean, I don't know about you, but it's not like I'm just 100% in the studio doing this one thing I have a family and, and roles and responsibilities beyond my actual work with Marianna Durst studio that required my attention. But just but just because I'm not in front of an easel or a canvas with a paintbrush in my hand doesn't mean that I stop being an artist. I'm an artist. I'm an entrepreneur. I have this podcast. I work with clients. And I'm always thinking about these things that I am and these roles and these people that I'm interacting or working with. It doesn't stop just because I'm not in the studio. And it's a practice and this practice is really important to bring it into the entrepreneurship side as well. Because when we truly live entrepreneurship as a practice, it'll allow us to spot opportunities that will let us sell or share our work with more people or in a different way. Sometimes, I don't know about you, but sometimes I might be just kind of wandering and having this question in my mind about what to do next or how to launch something or what offer to create. And one of the things that I really love doing is asking that question before I drift off to sleep at night. And sometimes I'll get answers through sleeping. Or sometimes it happens throughout the day. It's like I program myself with a little antenna, whose job is to seek out the information that will help me generate an answer for this question that I was asking. But if I were to not see myself as an entrepreneur when I walk out of my office, then I would have, I would not be as finely attuned to receiving this information. So I don't know, that's what I'm thinking about. I wonder what that made you think about.

Okay, time for the next one. which you'll find on page number 97. And this is the last paragraph on that page, I just randomly picked it. And it says, the rules artists learn are different. They are assumptions, not absolutes. They describe a goal or method for short term or long term results. They are there to be tested, and they are only a value as long as they are helpful. They are not laws of nature. Oh my gosh. And I'm laughing because if you've been listening to more episodes of this podcast before, or you've spoken with me, or heard pretty much, or read anything that I post online, you'll see how this is just the perfect thing for me to read. If you have been building a website or trying to build an audience on social media, or you're thinking about building your email list, etc., etc., all these things that come with being an entrepreneur and artist wanting to sell their own work, you'll probably research things, take courses even, classes, workshops, buy books, to learn how to do all these things. And something that I really believe in my heart is that these are rules that are meant maybe for the masses for the general entrepreneurs who are selling a product or a repeatable service or something that doesn't take as much creativity. But it's not so much for artists because the rules artists learn need to be different. They need to be ideas that we test with freedom, that we don't grasp onto and we don't take them as absolutes. Because if we take any of the prescribed methodologies out there as the only truth of how to build a business or grow a newsletter or sell out your collection, then we're going to end up burning out our creativity. Oh my gosh, that's why like this is perfect. This is a hill I'll die on.

All right, it's time for blurb number three. Let's see what we get. Innocence brings forth innovation. A lack of knowledge can create more openings to break new ground. This little blurb is found on page 121. Oof, I love that I got. this blurb, because it's something that I reflect on often, especially now that I'm approaching my painting practice. Even though I painted meant for many, many years. It was such a long span of me not doing it consistently that At some point recently, I decided to approach painting as a total beginner. And this is because in my life I've observed just the things that I'm capable of when I don't know how to do the thing the way that it's supposed to do. It's like I have so much freedom and I don't have any of the constraints. that keep me from generating more ideas because I don't know what's wrong. I don't know what people do or what aren't they're not supposed to do. I just try and having this beginner's mindset when it comes to marketing and business really allows you to push the boundaries of what's out there to write your own process of how you're going to market this collection. or how you're going to attract new collectors to your email newsletter, etc. That beginner's mindset is gold. And if we can remain in that zone, even if it's just in spirit and being an experimenter and testing all these things, not being attached to the process, we can learn a great deal, a great deal more our people, ourselves, and our work, because we're not having it handed to us by someone who's making a bunch of assumptions. This beginner's mindset is all about playing and having fun. When you remain in that innocent zone, when you don't let yourself become hardened by knowledge, you can truly start carving out this wonderful world for you to exist in and have a business in that drives the results that you are looking for.

All right, time for the next little blurb. This one is on page 219. And it's something that I've been thinking about recently, especially since at the time of this recording, the podcast episode with Kristin Cronic, all about art and success just came out this week. And this happens to be the chapter on success. So what a coincidence. So it says, How shall we measure success? It isn't popularity, money or critical esteem. Success occurs in the privacy of the soul. It comes in the moment you decide to release the work. before exposure to a single opinion. When you've done all you can to bring out the work's greatest potential and when you're pleased and ready to let go, success has nothing to do with variables outside yourself. This has been one of the most generous lessons that I've ever had the pleasure of learning. Probably, I can't say the hard way, but. maybe an uncomfortable way. I kind of have this idea of success being a multifaceted gem that you can look through the different facets and depending on what you're looking at is how you feel whether you feel successful or not. And I truly believe that there are so many ways so many opportunities for us to find success in everything that we do. And when we are so clear of what success means to us, specifically us, not what we've been told as success, but what we consider success, more of those facets of that success gem are going to be positive and lead to momentum. But if we let those external voices in that say, hey, if nobody buys any paintings from your collection launch your failure, if you let that voice in, more of your facets are going to turn into that negative tone. And they're not going to lead to motivation, they're going to lead to stagnation, and to hopelessness. That's why it's so important to protect those success jumps and keep them from being tarnished by other people's metrics or opinions or thoughts. Now, I'm not saying that you should see everything that you do as a success. I don't want to take away that drive for professional and personal development from you. But I do want to maybe make a suggestion, I guess, and I'm making it to myself because I'm kind of thinking about this idea, as I'm talking to you right now, that we can have different gems for each part of a project that we're working on. For example, we can have a success gem for the creation of the art. And we can look through the different facets of that gem and see, Hey, well, did we really communicate what we wanted to? Did, do we love, are we obsessed with this work? Could we have spent more time on it? Could we have clarified the technique a little bit better, et cetera? And then once you're happy and you're ready to release this work into the world, that creation success gem gets tucked away and put away in a little box of gems. And then once you work on the marketing plan and the launch, you can have another success gem that you look through. And so this one you can say, you can look through the different facets of did I show up how I wanted to? Did I conquer my fears? Did I do something that felt courageous? Did I try something different? That I did I put myself out there like I wanted to? Did I elevate this work like I wanted to? And that in itself is another gem, right? And then you can put that little gem. Once you launch your collection and you're working on that launch, you can pull out a different gem, which is kind of the more results-oriented gem that you can look through and say, OK, did my list grow? Did I get some sales? Did people connect with the work, did I get a lot of responses or comments, et cetera. And you can look through those different facets to see if you were successful in that area. And if a facet is showing that you could use some improvement or maybe suggest that you should try different things next time, then those are precious. Those are learning opportunities. Jot those things down for the next time that you have a launch. Jot those things that you learned because when you take action and make changes and show up in a different way, or maybe you try this other plan, then you can find your way through the entire process. And by keeping different gems separated, you can really allow yourself to feel successful, even if there were components of the project that maybe weren't hitting the target like you wanted them to.

Okay, friend, it's time for the final blurb. And I am venturing into the unknown. It's almost in the last section of the book, I would say page 401. I haven't read this part. I think I'm a little past the middle of the book. So I'm not entirely sure what the context is around this quote, but it says, however you frame yourself as an artist, the frame is too small. Oh my gosh. I think this quote is so relevant to branding as an artist. because sometimes what we learn in marketing and branding is that you need to have a niche, you need to have a target audience, and you need to have all these metrics about them, like their gender, how much money they make, where they shop, et cetera, et cetera. And all these things are valid. I mean, we need data points and we need to... have a strategy, our strategy can't be have no strategy. I mean, I guess it can if you are an artist of chaos. But this is where the conventional teachings of marketing and branding fall short for artists because they don't allow room to see yourself as a niche. It's not the kind of art that you are making today because who are we to tell our muse or our inspiration? what we're going to be doing in six months in a year in two years. And while we can have all sorts of goals in terms of our business growth and the number of collections that we want to release the partnerships that we want to nurture, it's kind of challenging and cutting ourselves short if we believe that the art we're making today is going to be the same that we're going to make in the future. We are preventing ourselves from evolving and we are conditioning our audience to expect this one thing from us, which can become a very slippery slope, right? Then having an audience that has this expectations means placing ourselves in a little sort of gilded prison because yay, they are responding to the work. But they're responding to the same thing over and over and over and over. And where is evolution in that? Where is the artistic journey in that? And that is what I truly believe is worth selling. That is where the niche is. It's not landscape paintings or portraits or pastel landscapes, it's you and your journey, your taste, your vision, your ability to explore and those discoveries that you bring to the surface and show everybody. And so this is when I go back to the quote that, you know, it says the frame is too small. The frame is definitely going to be too small for artists if we look at branding and marketing through that conventional lens.

Well, I really loved this experiment, and I hope you enjoyed coming along with me on this journey of randomly opening up the book, reading different paragraphs or quotes from it, and then tying them back into the liberated artist's way. And if you'd like me to do this with another book, I'm definitely open to suggestions. So I don't know, maybe you can send me a message on Instagram, I'm at Mariana Durst Studio. And you can let me know what book you think might be awesome to discuss on the podcast. And also, so you know, if you're listening and you have something interesting to share about being a liberated artist, breaking through that marketing and branding convention, or maybe you've tried a different way of launching your artwork that yielded some unexpected results that are exciting and you wanna share, there is a form to apply to be on the podcast on liberatedartistpodcast.com. If you just scroll a little bit, you'll find it there. And I'd love to hear from you. I love to connect with people and have conversations. So if you wanna be a guest on the podcast, I am now accepting applications and I'd love to talk to fellow liberated artists just like you. I'm your host, Mariana Durst, reminding you that in this world that loves slapping labels on things, you can be your own niche.

Today's episode was brought to you by Mariana Durst Studio's prolific and profitable artist quiz. A quick quiz to assess your marketing prowess, learn your superpowers, and get a personalized plan to overcome overwhelm and get your art seen and sold. Your art visibility plan awaits at marianadurstudio.com/quiz.

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