ON ARTISTS & FRIENDSHIP: WISE WORDS FROM JULIA CAMERON

This excerpt is from the March 5 entry in Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way Every Day: A Year of Creative Living.

We're fed a great deal of romance surrounding the lonely lot of the artist. Over a recent weekend, teaching in San Francisco, I asked for a show of hands from all the people who believed an artist's life would be lonely. In a room filled with two hundred people, nearly two hundred hands went up. Believing this, we can try to live it out - a prospect that makes for a great deal of pain.

The truth is that creativity occurs in clusters. Consider Paris in the twenties and the cluster that built up around Gertrude Stein's hospitality. Consider the Bloomsbury Group convening for Thursday night cocktails and inadvertently launching a movement. It can be argued that successful art is built on successful friendships. It can certainly be said that friends are what enable artists to go the distance.