Everything you learned about being an artist ignored the elephant in the room:
What if you grow up and live in a world of conflicting responsibilities?
Like most of us, I learned to be an artist in a fake environment. The University. I applied that model to the real world.
It worked for a while, until the time I built a life with responsibilities. My artist life was incompatible with functioning as an adult with a wife, kids, and a full-time job.
I went from working in the studio 12 hours a day to stealing small groggy moments of time before my kids woke up. I went from living (scraping by) off my studio income to getting a full-time job. I got the job because I wanted my family to have groceries and health insurance.
Studio time became sporadic. Energy and mental space were rare commodities.
How is this sustainable?
It’s not.
I was fucked.
Then I completely changed everything.
This book, based on The Durable Artist cohort opening August 6, 2025, outlines the path I took to reinvent my art career. I wrote it to help you do the same. This time with an approach rooted in the real world. You can abandon faulty lessons learned in academia and romantic tales of starving tortured artists.
You can thrive as an artist even with a full, demanding life outside of art. You don’t need more hours in the day; you need to totally overhaul your approach to making.
Let’s explore how to embrace your new limitations, focus on what matters most, eliminate distractions, and build a sustainable creative practice that works with your life, not against it.
By the end of this book, you’ll have practical tools to maintain your art career while thriving in every other area of your life. You will have strategies to maximize every stolen minute, the habits to consistently build momentum, and the roadmap to put it all into play.
Let’s go.