When was your last artist spree?

Do something fun

I’ve been buying a lot of stickers lately.

Colorful, unnecessary, childish stickers. Big pansies with realistic detail, purchased in a craft store without any plan. A Violette Sticker Club subscription that brought delicate Victorian roses, unicorns, angels, and cats as a fun surprise in the mail.

Artists need adventure, and to me, “adventure” means fun, whimsy, and color. I’m almost halfway through Julia Cameron’s Walking in this World course (her follow-up to The Artist’s Way) and trying to take myself on “Artist Dates” again. I loved this gem from Week 4 of the course, which encourages you to discover your sense of adventure.

“Adventure is a nutrient, not a frivolity,” Cameron says.

I’ve known for a long time that letting myself be free and have fun is where I struggle. Confession: I haven’t been doing my Artist’s Dates. (For the uninitiated: The Artist Date is one of Cameron’s foundational tools. It’s a 1-hour, weekly, solo outing that can be basically anything that sounds fun and encourages your creativity.) I can show up for the daily work of creativity, but carving out that full hour once a week to do something unnecessary and frivolous — it just feels like too much. I don’t have the time. I don’t know what to do for a whole hour. I don’t want to schedule anything else when I already feel overscheduled.

And yet, reading this chapter gave me new life. I want more adventure and fun, and I know that they’re essential both for avoiding burnout and finding inspiration.

In my “slowing down” year, I’m trying to find ways to make creative practices sustainable and accessible. Locking myself down to a full hour of an activity every week isn’t doable for me, right now. But tossing aside Artist’s Dates altogether also wasn’t working for me.

I decided to tweak the term and the practice for myself by permitting “Artist Sprees”: doing something fun for my artist, once or twice a week (and hopefully more often!), in a way that fits into my normal schedule and doesn’t feel like extra work.

I’m not tying myself to an exact, full hour. I don’t have to drive to a museum or take on some new creative work (I once bought watercolors on an Artist Date, painted a few times, and then felt wasteful when I never picked them up again). I can stop on my way home to wander a local bookstore for half an hour. I can go to Michael’s and buy stickers and a puzzle (did this, highly recommend it!), or sit in a coffee shop with a latte and a book, or go down some creative rabbit hole when I have a spare 20 minutes. Watching a TV comedy episode with total focus could be a 22-minute artist spree, while giving myself enough time to watch a whole movie could be a 2-hour artist spree. I can find the spirit of the Artist’s Date idea while not following its exact stipulations.

Something I come back to in every area of my life is the realization that it’s better to take on a small, practical, doable goal than to have a big, ambitious one in mind and never actually make it happen. When I was working through The Artist’s Way, I did need to stick closely to its tools and guidelines because I was stuck. I needed black-and-white rules in order to make a drastic change. But as an active creative now, I know I need to find more flexible, sustainable practices that work for (what I hope will be) a lifetime of creativity.

Some frivolous small fun things that my artist apparently needed.

Perhaps this newsletter gave you an idea for your next Artist Spree — or made you realize that you’ve been doing this creative practice all along, without the need to come up with a term for it. You can reply to this email, or any email, to let me know. I’d love to hear from you.

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