Speaking of: Applied Patience

I went on a ten-day roadtrip through Southern California last month, dipping in and out of coastal cities and making my way through everything the coastline has to offer. One of those things is lots of high-brow art galleries tucked into busy downtown shopping districts, because when you're rich and live in Southern California, there's nothing better to do with your Saturday than go downtown with all your other rich buddies and contemplate buying a $15,000 limited-edition Ansel Adams print before instead deciding on a $25,000 Lichtenstein. It's just what you do. And at some point in the middle of my roadtrip, I decided to start liking these art galleries. So I began going inside whenever I passed one that looked interesting.

While in Santa Barbara, I was meandering down State Street when I stumbled across a gallery of pop art pieces that didn't look like anything I had ever seen before. I can only describe the style as like artisan pop-up books with "Where's Waldo?" levels of detail in the scenery. The scale of these pieces was almost inconceivable. Each work had a ridiculously overwhelming amount of data to take in, but the artist's style was so playful and accessible that it never felt like a chore to labor over every detail. I was fascinated.

I started chatting with the woman behind the counter, and she told me all about the artist Charles Fazzino and how he developed his style and how red hot his work is right now among collectors, who are all anxiously trying to avoid missing the next Warhol. She was an art history grad student at one of the nearby universities and was getting ready to start teaching her own art classes to aspiring students, which she seemed really excited about.

I mentioned to the woman that while I consider myself to be a pretty creative person, I was never very good at physical art, be it painting or drawing or sculpting or whatever. She sort of nodded to acknowledge my point but brought up something I had never really thought about before: for most of human history, art was considered a trade. We think of artists now as people who were hand-picked by God to have natural talent, and the most important factor in determining your success is what genes you were born with. But go back to the renaissance and art was considered a trade that you studied and learned, just like being a plumber or a mechanic or an electrician. Aspiring artists went to art school, and then they took an apprenticeship with a professional artist, and eventually they were an artist. She wrapped up her thought by saying, "See, being an artist isn't inaccessible for anyone. All art is is...applied patience."

The minute she finished those words, we locked eyes and our mouths hit the ground. "That's it," I said. "That's what art is. It's applied patience. That's freaking brilliant."

"That's gonna be the name of my course," she said, pulling out a pen and paper and writing the phrase down before she forgot. "'Applied Patience.'"

She managed to sum up in two words what I had failed to adequately capture in 24 years of trying to explain it. I am a songwriter, but that's not because I think anything about me makes me more qualified or proficient at writing songs than anyone else. I just put in the time of sitting with my guitar in my bedroom, aimlessly grasping for a melody or lyric to feel good in my mouth, going absolutely nowhere 99% of the time but eventually finding the 1% that shows me where the song needs to go and reignites my love for the creative process. Finding a song isn't "getting lucky." It's more tactical than that. It's knowing you need to put forth the effort to have any chance of getting lucky. It's applied patience.

The secrets out. No one is naturally gifted at art. Some people just apply their patience better than others.