As artists, you and I are struggling each day to dominate our material, to shape it into a cohesive whole with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But at the same time, the raw entity defies us. It’s a living thing, with its own power and its own destiny. It “wants” to be something. Our job is to discover what that something is—and to help it become

the artist’s job is of two kinds: The work of doing. The work of being.

Pressures and expectations come from different directions. Society’s mores dictate what’s right and wrong, what’s accepted and frowned upon, what’s celebrated and reviled.