You always start from the premise that, as an artist, you shouldn’t care too much about results. Instead, you should just do the work. Especially in lieu of accolades, fame, or success, the process, we’re told, is where you find solace. It’s meant as buttress against the vocational trials and tribulations, to be the reward in itself. The implication is that simply having the opportunity to create is, on its own, enough to keep moving forward.

But as someone who’s been making films for the past ten years with little mainstream success, I’ve often found the adage of “enjoying the process” somewhat annoying. Sure, pronounced by professors who’ve barely squeezed out a film in twenty years and delivered to an audience of twenty-something-year-olds, pilgrims at the altar of knowledge, it carries weight. But in real life, when you’ve taken three or four serious cracks at the thing and not heard a single reverb, no sign that the work has landed, the phrase rings hollow.

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Even at the best of times, when things seem to be going your way, there can be little real enjoyment in the process. It’s disproportionately painful, humdrum. You sit with your loneliness, trying to think up ideas to turn into a film, a photograph, a painting, a song. It’s thankless work. And if the process itself is rarely satisfying, then without some external affirmation (something, anything to hang your hat on) the whole exercise starts to feel like talking into a void.

At a certain point, after multiple unsuccessful attempts, some lean into performative detachment, feigning indifference to rejection, sometimes even preemptively denigrating their own work as a bulwark against disappointment. The logic is simple: if I claim not to care, if I undermine my own work before others get the chance, then I’ve robbed the public of its power to dismiss me.

This fickle defence strategy creates a Catch-22: the more you posture indifference, the less seriously others take your work. What begins as a shield against rejection becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only does the process remain just as painful, but the perceived worth of your work diminishes in the eyes of others. 

And so the cycle continues. The thought of going back to the blank page, blank canvas, blank music sheet, to risk failure all over again, is daunting enough under any circumstances. But when previous efforts have gone unnoticed, when each attempt dissolves into the void, it’s not just motivation that starts to wear thin. Confidence does, too. 

To my mind, confidence is reinforced through recognition, through the feeling that your work matters, that people give a damn about what you say and make, that they’re anticipating your next move. If you don’t have a core audience, if you’ve never had a breakthrough, then what exactly are you supposed to return to the process for? Why make art at all?

A while ago, scraping the proverbial bottom and looking for some kind of reason to keep going, to keep writing and creating, I came across a wonderful interview with Martin Scorsese. It’s entitled I Have To Find Out Who The Hell I Am. In it, he talks about faith, aging, morality (all sorts of things) but most salient are his thoughts on why, at the ripe age of 80, and as someone who’s had all the success any filmmaker could dream of, he still finds the desire to keep going.

I find this bit particularly profound (he’s drawing a parallel between the act of filmmaking and his personal quest to reconcile the mysteries of existence):

“Flannery O’Connor talks about faith as being in a dark room and stumbling until you get the light switch. And so it’s a dark room. And there’s that little bit of light maybe somewhere, you know?”

Here, he’s responding to everything: faith, aging, morality, and a lifelong sense of introspection, an ongoing search for identity and purpose both as a filmmaker and as a person. He frames this process as one of constant questioning, evolving priorities, and an effort to align his art and his existence with some deeper truth. “I have to find out who the hell I am,” he says. I love that line. It strips away every external measure of success and reminds me that, no matter how far along you think you are, there’s always more to uncover. It’s an admission that even with all the accolades in the world, you’re still unfinished, still wrestling with the bigger questions that fuel art in the first place.

Personally, I’ve always found the creative process to be anxiety inducing, harrowing even. At least the kind of creative work that’s deeply personal, what Scorsese describes as: “You’ve got to rip it out of your skull and your guts. To find out what you really feel should be said at this point in life by you. Otherwise, what’s the point of making it? You’ve got to be saying something.” It’s essentially mining pain in hopes of some kind of transcendence, a rising from the ashes of the self, where you’re pulverised in the process of giving birth to higher thing. (I’m using that analogy loosely, given that I’ve seen my wife give birth and don’t presume to know anything about the depth of that experience; I’m only approximating some kind of truth here.)

So, as I was saying, all this talk about enjoying the process needs to ease up a tad. I’d go for something more like, “brace for an ass-whooping, but hope that some deep mystery about yourself and the world will reveal itself on the other side”. Essentially, this thing with call art is an elusive plaything for those hell-bent on discovering something greater than themselves, and that thing is often parked in the jaws of failure and you must reach in and snatch it away. 

For the past three months, I’ve been going through a mentorship program at Magnum Photos, working under the guidance of Matt Black, the remarkable American photographer. I first encountered Matt’s work in a documentary Magnum had commissioned. I remember watching him talk, voice-overs pulling excerpts from his journals, and thinking, I’d love to learn from this guy. There was also something about the fact that he’d dedicated almost his entire career to photographing California’s Central Valley. His single-minded pursuit, his steadfast commitment to a place, a people, a cause bigger than himself, and his reluctance to become a purely commercial photographer. I found all that deeply admirable. Rare.

We get together once every month or so, and each time, the conversation naturally drifts from specifics of my current project to Matt’s philosophical musings on photography and art. In reflecting on why so many of us keep coming back to our craft, despite the strife and perpetual disappointments, I’ll quote Matt Black here. For context, I’d asked, “Did you face opposition at the beginning of your career? Gatekeepers rejecting your work, not digging your style, pushing back on your voice, what made you keep going?” And he said:

“I had to realize very early on that I was stuck with this voice, this style… that when I turned my lens on a subject, it would come out in this very particular way, shaped by my predilections and sensibilities. So I gave up trying to be someone else, and instead let go of that desperate fight for control. I surrendered to it. I make art, I take pictures, because it’s my passport to the world, enumerating its mysteries, allowing me to understand it, to understand myself. It’s the passport to yourself.”

For me, the allure stems from a desire to articulate deep, often ineffable feelings and preoccupations. The sort of stuff that would otherwise be impossible to convey. And I submit that, more often than not, this pursuit is akin to self-flagellation. But maybe that’s the very point: in that friction, in the risk and the pain, we unearth something real about who we are and why we’re here.