Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life

By Mason Currey

"Mason Currey is the undisputed master of finding, in the messy lives of great artists and thinkers throughout time, deeply human lessons about cultivating meaning in our current age." --Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of Slow Productivity and Deep Work

Daily Rituals author Mason Currey weaves together delightful, illuminating stories and reflections about how famous artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers throughout history have managed to successfully (or not) support a creative life.

Many of us are drawn to a life in the arts but daunted by how to balance that ambition with the very real need to pay rent and put food on the table. It is impossible to become an accomplished painter, composer, or novelist without spending time experimenting, making false starts, absorbing criticism, reading, talking, and moping about the house. All this time must be purchased, one way or another. Is the history of art and ideas just a history of rich kids?

The answer, of course, is no. William Carlos Williams was a family doctor. Franz Kafka was an insurance man, as were Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens. Grace Hartigan temped. James Joyce mooched off his brother; Christopher Isherwood ingratiated himself with a wealthy uncle. Virginia Woolf and Louisa May Alcott were determined to make their writing pay no matter what. And their material circumstances had an impact on all of their creative outputs.

From family money to jobs to colorful schemes, Mason Currey, author of the acclaimed Daily Rituals, explores both the well-worn and unlikely paths forward for the up-and-coming artist. Making Art and Making a Living is an entertaining and thought-provoking examination of the collision of creative ambitions with real-world necessities and of the messy, glorious, torturous compromises that gifted individuals have patched together when facing the eternal dilemma of an artistic life.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250824524
• ISBN13: 9781250824523
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Celadon Books
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 2.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.6" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Every creative person needs to read this!

I had not heard about Mason Currey and his Daily Rituals books. Making Art and making a Living is the first book I read by him. I feel like I discovered Gillian Flynn! These categories about what famous writers, artists, poets, musicians actually went through before or sometimes during they got successful. Currey picks the most interesting anecdotes to give us a real and sometimes humorous, sometimes shocking account of the relationship of money/ survival to art/creativity/ freedom. Men and women from many different centuries are examined: Louise Nevelson, Alexander Pope, Augusta Savage are just a few. Currey is an elegant and professional writer who researched deeply and is just smart as sin. If you are a creative person in any way you will relate to this long- needed subject and delight in reading such an honest and well-told book. You will want to tell your friends.