Invisible Discipline
The real work eludes capture and, without show, goes on.
from Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud by Martin Gayford:
‘I always thought,’ says LF, ‘that an artist’s was the hardest life of all.’ Its rigour — not always apparent to an outside observer — is that an artist has to navigate forward into the unknown guided only by an internal sense of direction, keep up a set of standards which are imposed entirely from within, meanwhile maintaining faith that the task he or she has set him or herself is worth struggling constantly to achieve. This is all contrary to the notion of bohemian disorder.
For a number of years, now, painters have been informing my writer’s sense of artistic pathways, Lucian Freud notably so. I admire his eight-hour days (or nights) standing before a canvas well into his eighties. In the same book, he’s quoted as saying, “When one is doing something to do with quality, even a lifetime doesn’t seem enough.”
The three parts of the above sequenced thought on the sort of vital discipline necessary for carrying through an original vision are conducive to bullet points — nevermind haha signature llm slop regurgitating everything into bullet points, along with overuse of parallelisms in its prose, balanced phrases and clauses, antithesis. Here, the bullets are for and of personal shots, projectile trajectories, borne of lived practice and hard-earned discernment: distillation of Lucian Freud’s pursuit of what Poetry, Thought, Word Magick designates as Old-New Mastery of the Creative Path.
dare the unknown lit solely by an internal sense
uphold standards set solely from an internal gauge
keep faith that one’s lifelong task is worthy of the cost of its fulfillment
on the flipside, Visible Psyche…
Fashion as visible surfacing of the unconscious
How could the New Yorker article “Freudian Slips: the psychology of fashion” by Leslie Jamison (Dec. 29, 2025 & Jan. 5, 2026) fail to mention the podcast Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud, Lucian Freud’s daughter? (& great-grandaughter of Sigmund Freud)
So far I’ve heard Freud talk of clothes and her father and the analytic couch with Kim Gordon, Kate Moss, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Is there something to make of all the K’s here? — that bouba-kiki effect in full force across cultures, sounds are shapes to what better latent than never symbolic content. Noting too that the 1998 movie Hideous Kinky with Kate Winslet is about her and her sister and their mother in 1970’s Morocco.
The first part of your post I really understand well as an artist. It is a practice to trust that an inner drive for creating what you alone see as vital to create in the world is valid and important. For me it's now only occasionally a mentally hard practice. Mostly I think: why would I even bother doing anything less than this? So while the vocation of creation is diligent work, I think, OMG it would be so so so much harder for me to get up every day and carry out someone else's orders for a pursuit that is only about my livelihood. But other people, that is comfort and ease I suppose. When things do get challenging with the self direction, I do find myself longing for someone to just tell me what to do and how to be "successful." But eeewww, to see myself in that weakened state having lost my resolve: it's both human and repulsive. Replusive (and I'm only talking about a view of myself here) because I don't need that anymore. I don't need to feel tired by the hard work and seek some kind of reprieve. Therefore, ease with the challenge of self-actualizing comes to those who commit to following the inner light.