The Compulsion to Make

Art as Process, Necessity, and Lived Reckoning

Art is often framed as a choice, a calling, or a moment of inspiration. But for me, it is none of these. The act of making is not elective; it’s a compulsion.

That compulsion doesn’t arise from clarity or comfort. It comes from pressure. From urgency. From the need to externalize what will rot or rupture if kept inside. Making is survival through material. Through motion. Through labor.

This need isn’t beautiful. It isn’t poetic. It’s rarely productive in any traditional sense. Sometimes I want to paint. Sometimes, I want to destroy something. Sometimes I just need to mow the lawn, clean the shop, or maybe lift something heavy until I’m completely spent. These are not hobbies. They’re ways to offload pressure. Ways to keep from splitting open.

When art does come, it doesn’t arrive as joy. It’s more Nosferatu than muse: a painful hunger for something that might kill you if you ever actually possess it. Desire wrapped in doom. A need that punishes either way. If I’m not working, the stillness becomes unbearable. That’s when the past returns. That’s when anxiety surfaces. Creating doesn’t fix it. But it moves it. It gives the chaos somewhere to go.

This isn’t about being inspired. Inspiration suggests a moment of grace, a sudden burst of insight. Compulsion is slower, more persistent, and far less romantic. Compulsion builds. Quietly. Then loudly. Until it finds a way out. Through movement, gesture, object, mark. Painting, writing, splitting wood, rearranging the shop. That’s why the object doesn’t matter much to me. It’s just an artifact. The making was the art. The object is proof that it happened, not the thing itself.

In the moment, there’s a kind of focus. A state close to meditation. But it’s not peace. It’s presence. Alertness. Attention. You can’t just watch it. You have to be in it. With the material. With your breath. With your own resistance. Process takes over. The product is just what's left at the end.

The distinction matters.

The art world often centers the product. The thing that can be bought, shown, praised, archived. But what remains is residue. At best, it’s evidence of something lived. At worst, it’s a tombstone.

Though the act of making begins in solitude, it doesn’t end there. When someone stands before the residue, something can still happen. It isn’t contagious, but it is an echo. A viewer might see something in the work that shifts how they see themselves. That spark of recognition is its own process. When someone truly engages with a piece, they become part of it. They start making too. Not with their hands, but with their mind and body. The process isn’t owned by the artist; it’s only initiated. The viewer is not outside the work; they’re inside it, in the same way the maker once was.

This perspective doesn’t sit easily with the expectations of institutions or markets. The demand for productivity and the placement of object over necessity distorts the nature of making. It’s simple: go to the studio, make your mark, repeat. But the mark has to mean something. It has to come from the pressure. If it doesn’t, it’s empty. It’s mimicry. Performance. Noise.

Art isn’t spectacle. It’s an encounter. With the self. With material. With something unspeakable. The gallery holds the leftovers. The “art”? It happened before.

The gallery is a graveyard.

The real thing took place in a moment of urgency, when there was no other choice.

And sometimes, if the viewer is ready, it happens again, right there in the silence between looking and feeling. Between attention and recognition.

That’s where the art lives.

It’s not noble.
It’s rarely clean.
But it’s real.
This is the compulsion to make, and it’s ongoing.