The Moment Art Becomes Your Job, Something Changes.

Karya Öner
4 hours ago
3 min read

I left Turkey without much artistic experience, jumping into art school in a foreign country, knowing no one and speaking none of the language. Everything was uncertain. I always believed that if I followed my dreams, life would somehow meet me halfway.

I knew, especially as a foreigner who hadn’t studied art before, that I’d struggle to fit into an artistic community. I found myself making work not for my own pleasure or curiosity anymore, but almost involuntarily, to be liked. I was playing it safe.

Then I realised this was something I’d have to get used to, because I think it’s a problem most artists share: once you start making art to earn a living from it, motivation and desire quietly start to slip away.

By my second year, the uncertainty had settled and I’d gotten used to the rhythm, though it never really disappeared. It just changed shape. Underneath the artistic uncertainty was always another kind: residence permits, a language I was still catching up on, finding accommodation, trying to socialise. You don’t just wonder what to do next; you wonder whether it’s all worth it.

What I mean by uncertainty is this: no matter how hard you work at this path, you never quite know where it leads. There’s nothing steady or guaranteed about choosing to be an artist. And if that uncertainty isn’t managed well, it stops being something that feeds you and turns into something that eats away at you.

I’d been drawing and painting since childhood, but now it was suddenly expected to happen within a concept, a framework, a subject. At the same time, I had this itch to try different mediums. I did try, but it only left me more confused. I didn’t know which medium to commit to. I felt lost. So I decided to read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

While reading it, I remembered something. Inspiration was never going to arrive while you sat and waited for it, and neither was the medium through which you’d express yourself. The instinct to create was something you could weave into life itself, whether or not you called yourself an artist. It lived in small gestures: in letting yourself be bored, in resisting constant stimulation, in sitting with an idea until it settled, in sketching wherever you travelled, in keeping a journal, but most of all, in staying curious.

Cameron’s book calls for something even more concrete: an “artist date,” a small, solitary appointment with the child still inside you. It doesn’t have to be profound. Going to the cinema alone, wandering through a museum, eating ice cream on the beach by yourself. No audience, no purpose, no need to turn it into anything. Just you, feeding your own curiosity again.

She also talks about morning pages: three pages written the moment you wake up, before your mind has had the chance to organise itself into to-do lists and worry. Whatever comes out, comes out. Half-formed thoughts, complaints, fragments of dreams. It doesn’t matter. The point is that the fog in your head gets poured onto the page first thing instead of following you around all day, quietly steering your decisions without your permission. Once it’s on paper, it loses its grip on you.

Picasso once said that every child is an artist. The question is what happens after. We lose our curiosity because we have to adapt to a practical order, and the small acts of making start to feel like a waste of time. Maybe that’s exactly why these small rituals matter: an artist date here, three pages there. Not grand gestures, just small acts of making, done consistently.

If we could weave that curiosity back into our lives, and I think this is possible through practice, we’d start noticing the small details again, feeling life more instead of just moving through it. Everything happens so fast now, and I left one country for another chasing something I couldn’t quite name. Maybe if we made room for creation in our lives, artist or not, at home or far from it, we’d become better at whatever we do, and more present wherever we are.

Some of these thoughts come from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way; others come from my own experience.