Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

  He did not eat anything after that until five in the afternoon. Later, at the end of 1880, he began to take luncheon at two or three. He was not talkative at breakfast and soon retired to his study with a glass of tea. We hardly saw him after that until dinner.

  According to Sergei, Tolstoy worked in isolation—no one was allowed to enter his study, and the doors to the adjoining rooms were locked to ensure that he would not be interrupted. (An account by Tolstoy’s daughter Tatyana disagrees on this point—she remembers that their mother was allowed in the study; she would sit on the divan sewing quietly while her husband wrote.) Before dinner, Tolstoy would go for a walk or a ride, often to supervise some work on the estate grounds. Afterward he rejoined the family in a much more sociable mood. Sergei writes:

  At five we had dinner, to which Father often came late. He would be stimulated by the day’s impressions and tell us about them. After dinner he usually read or talked to guests if there were any; sometimes he read aloud to us or saw to our lessons. About 10 P.M. all the inhabitants of [Yasnaya] foregathered again for tea. Before going to sleep he read again, and at one time he played the piano. And then retired to his bed about 1 A.M.

  Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)

  In 1885, Tchaikovsky rented a dacha in Maidanovo, a small village in the district of Klin, some fifty miles northwest of Moscow. After years of restless wandering through Russia and Europe, the forty-five-year-old composer found his new living arrangement a wonderful relief. “What a joy to be in my own home!” he wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck. “What a bliss to know that no one will come to interfere with my work, my reading, my walks.” He would live in or near Klin for the rest of his life.

  Soon after arriving, Tchaikovsky established a daily routine that he followed whenever he was home. He woke early, between 7:00 and 8:00, and gave himself an hour to drink his tea, smoke, and read, first from the Bible, then from some other volume that, his brother, Modest, writes, “was not only pleasure but also work”—a book in English, perhaps, or the philosophy of Spinoza or Schopenhauer. Then he took his first walk of the day, lasting no more than forty-five minutes. At 9:30, Tchaikovsky set to work—composing at the piano only after he had dealt with any proofs or his correspondence, chores that he disliked. “Before setting about the pleasant task,” his brother noted, “Pyotr Ilich always hastened to get rid of the unpleasant.”

  At noon precisely he broke for lunch, which he always enjoyed—the composer was not picky about his food and found virtually every dish excellently prepared, often conveying his compliments to the chef. After lunch he went for a long walk, regardless of the weather. His brother writes, “Somewhere at sometime he had discovered that a man needs a two-hour walk for his health, and his observance of this rule was pedantic and superstitious, as though if he returned five minutes early he would fall ill, and unbelievable misfortunes of some sort would ensue.”

  Tchaikovsky’s superstition may have been justified—his walks were essential to his creativity, and he often stopped to jot down ideas that he would later flesh out at the piano. In a letter to von Meck, Tchaikovsky provided a valuable glimpse of his process.

  The seed of a future composition usually reveals itself suddenly, in the most unexpected fashion. If the soil is favourable—that is, if I am in the mood for work, this seed takes root with inconceivable strength and speed, bursts through the soil, puts out roots, leaves, twigs, and finally flowers: I cannot define the creative process except through this metaphor. All the difficulties lie in this: that the seed should appear, and that it should find itself in favourable circumstances. All the rest happens of its own accord. It would be futile for me to try and express to you in words the boundless bliss of that feeling which envelops you when the main idea has appeared, and when it begins to take definite forms. You forget everything, you are almost insane, everything inside you trembles and writhes, you scarcely manage to set down sketches, one idea presses upon another.

  After his walk, Tchaikovsky had tea and read the newspaper or historical journals for an hour; then, at 5:00, he put in another two hours of work. Supper was at 8:00. After the meal, if there were guests, Tchaikovsky loved to play cards; if he was alone, he read, played patience, and, his brother notes, “always found himself a little bored.”

  Mark Twain (1835–1910)

  In the 1870s and ’80s, the Twain family spent their summers at Quarry Farm in New York, about two hundred miles west of their Hartford, Connecticut, home. Twain found those summers the most productive time for his literary work, especially after 1874, when the farm owners built him a small private study on the property. That same summer, Twain began writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. His routine was simple: he would go to the study in the morning after a hearty breakfast and stay there until dinner at about 5:00. Since he skipped lunch, and since his family would not venture near the study—they would blow a horn if they needed him—he could usually work uninterruptedly for several hours. “On hot days,” he wrote to a friend, “I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirts of.”

  After dinner, Twain would read his day’s work to the assembled family. He liked to have an audience, and his evening performances almost always won their approval. On Sundays, Twain skipped work to relax with his wife and children, read, and daydream in some shady spot on the farm. Whether or not he was working, he smoked cigars constantly. One of his closest friends, the writer William Dean Howells, recalled that after a visit from Twain, “the whole house had to be aired, for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime.” Howells also records Twain’s difficulties getting to sleep at night:

  In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth considering, and Scotch whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard. One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o’clock, and he had gone promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like effect ever since. Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged him.

  Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922)

  As a young man, Bell tended to work around the clock, allowing himself only three or four hours of sleep a night. After his marriage and his wife’s pregnancy, however, the American inventor was persuaded to keep more regular hours. His wife, Mabel, forced him to get out of bed for breakfast each morning at 8:30 A.M.—“It is hard work and tears are spent over it sometimes,” she noted in a letter—and convinced him to reserve a few work-free hours after they dined together at 7:00 P.M. (He was allowed to return to his study at 10:00.)

  Once he got adjusted to it, Bell found that his new family-friendly schedule agreed with him—but he couldn’t keep it up indefinitely. When in the throes of a new idea, he pleaded with his wife to let him be free of family obligations; sometimes, in these states, he would work for up to twenty-two hours straight without sleep. According to Mabel’s journal, Bell explained to her that “I have my periods of restlessness when my brain is crowded with ideas tingling to my fingertips when I am excited and cannot stop for anybody.” Mabel eventually accepted his relentless focus on his work, but not without some resentment. She wrote to him in 1888, “I wonder do you think of me in the midst of that work of yours of which I am so proud and yet so jealous, for I know it has stolen from me part of my husband’s heart, for where h
is thoughts and interests lie, there must his heart be.”

  Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

  “Today again from seven o’clock in the morning till six in the evening I worked without stirring except to take some food a step or two away,” van Gogh wrote in an 1888 letter to his brother, Theo, adding, “I have no thought of fatigue, I shall do another picture this very night, and I shall bring it off.” This seems to have been typical for the artist; when in the grip of creative inspiration, van Gogh painted nonstop, “in a dumb fury of work,” barely pausing to eat. And when his friend and fellow painter Paul Gauguin came to visit a few months later, van Gogh’s habits scarcely changed. He wrote to Theo, “Our days pass in working, working all the time, in the evening we are dead beat and go off to the café, and after that, early to bed! Such is our life.”

  N. C. Wyeth (1882–1945)

  The American painter and illustrator woke at 5:00 A.M. every day and chopped wood until 6:30. Then, “fortified by grapefruit, eggs, pancakes, and coffee,” the biographer David Michaelis writes, Wyeth climbed the hill to his studio. Before painting he liked to settle his breakfast by writing a letter, which he often mailed right away, driving to the village post office in his station wagon. On the way back, he would look in on a painting student, sometimes taking up the brush himself for a “working criticism.”

  Back at his studio, Wyeth donned a smock, stuck a pipe between his teeth, hooked a giant palette onto his left thumb, and set to work, pacing in front of his easel in between rapid brushstrokes. He worked fast, sometimes completing an entire painting in only a few hours. If the work wasn’t going well, Wyeth would tape a piece of cardboard to the side of his glasses, blocking his view of the studio’s large north window in an effort to improve his concentration. When he broke for lunch at 1:00, he would sometimes forget to remove this makeshift blinder—a sure sign to his family that the work was going poorly and he would be in a bad temper.

  Generally, however, Wyeth was happy as long as he was painting—and his children were welcome to join him in the studio in the afternoons, playing among themselves while he continued to paint in silence. Wyeth almost never worked under artificial light, so the daylight hours were precious to him. He hated to stop at the end of the day, often wishing he could start the next day immediately. “It’s the hardest work in the world to try not to work!” he said.

  Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986)

  “I like to get up when the dawn comes,” O’Keeffe told an interviewer in 1966. “The dogs start talking to me and I like to make a fire and maybe some tea and then sit in bed and watch the sun come up. The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.” Living in the New Mexico desert, which she made her permanent home from 1949 until her death, O’Keeffe had no trouble finding the solitude that she craved. Most days she took a half-hour walk in the early morning, keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes on her property, which she would kill with her walking stick (she kept their rattles in a box to show to visitors). Then there would be breakfast at 7:00, prepared by O’Keeffe’s cook—a typical meal included hot chili with garlic oil, soft-boiled or scrambled eggs, bread with a savory jam, sliced fresh fruit, and coffee or tea. If she was painting, O’Keeffe would then work in her studio for the rest of the day, breaking at noon for lunch. If she wasn’t painting, she would work in the garden, do housework, answer letters, and receive visitors. But the painting days were the best days, O’Keeffe said:

  On the other days one is hurrying through the other things one imagines one has to do to keep one’s life going. You get the garden planted. You get the roof fixed. You take the dog to the vet. You spend a day with a friend.… You may even enjoy doing such things.… But always you are hurrying through these things with a certain amount of aggravation so that you can get at the paintings again because that is the high spot—in a way it is what you do all the other things for.… The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one’s life.

  O’Keeffe’s last meal of the day was a light supper at 4:30 in the afternoon—she ate early in order to leave plenty of time for an evening drive through her beloved countryside. “When I think of death,” she once said, “I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore.”

  Sergey Rachmaninoff (1873–1943)

  “Some pianists say they are the slaves of their instrument,” Rachmaninoff told a reporter in 1933. “If I am its slave, all I can say is—I have a very kind master.” Two hours a day was all the practice he needed to stay in top form. Composing, however, was a different matter—Rachmaninoff could never seem to find as much uninterrupted time as he needed. As he wrote to a friend in 1907, “today I worked only from 9 A.M. to 12:30. Then lunch, and now I write you instead of working. I have one free hour and then an hour’s walk. Then 2 hours’ practice, and then I retire with the chickens. Thus I have only about 4 hours a day for composition. Too little!”

  Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

  The Russian-born novelist’s writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which he stored in long file boxes. Since, Nabokov claimed, he pictured an entire novel in complete form before he began writing it, this method allowed him to compose passages out of sequence, in whatever order he pleased; by shuffling the cards around, he could quickly rearrange paragraphs, chapters, and whole swaths of the book. (His file box also served as portable desk; he started the first draft of Lolita on a road trip across America, working nights in the backseat of his parked car—the only place in the country, he said, with no noise and no drafts.) Only after months of this labor did he finally relinquish the cards to his wife, Vera, for a typed draft, which would then undergo several more rounds of revisions.

  As a young man, Nabokov preferred to write in bed while chain-smoking, but as he grew older (and quit smoking) his habits changed. He described his routine in a 1964 interview: “I generally start the day at a lovely old-fashioned lectern I have in my study. Later on, when I feel gravity nibbling at my calves, I settle down in a comfortable armchair alongside an ordinary writing desk; and finally, when gravity begins climbing up my spine, I lie down on a couch in a corner of my small study.” By this time he had settled with his wife in a six-room apartment at the top floor of the Palace Hotel, in Montreux, Switzerland, where he could look down on Lake Geneva from his lectern. In the same interview, Nabokov elaborated on his daily schedule:

  I awake around seven in winter: my alarm clock is an Alpine chough—big, glossy, black thing with big yellow beak—which visits the balcony and emits a most melodious chuckle. For a while I lie in bed mentally revising and planning things. Around eight: shave, breakfast, enthroned meditation, and bath—in that order. Then I work till lunch in my study, taking time out for a short stroll with my wife along the lake.… We lunch around one P.M., and I am back at my desk by half-past one and work steadily till half-past six. Then a stroll to a newsstand for the English papers, and dinner at seven. No work after dinner. And bed around nine. I read till half-past eleven, and then tussle with insomnia till one A.M.

  “My habits are simple, my tastes banal,” he later wrote. His keenest pleasures were “soccer matches on the TV, an occasional cup of wine or a triangular gulp of canned beer, sunbaths on the lawn, and composing chess problems.” And, of course, pursuing his beloved butterflies, which he did in summer on the Alpine slopes, often hiking fifteen miles or more a day—after which, he grumpily noted, “I sleep even worse than in winter.”

  Balthus (1908–2001)

  The enigmatic painter published his first book at age twelve—it contained forty drawings illustrating a story about a cat by Rainer Maria Rilke, his mother’s lover at the time—and he continued to paint daily into his eighties. By then, the self-styled Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola had ensconced himself in a palatial chalet in the Swiss Alps, where he lived a life of aristocratic r
efinement surrounded by his wife, his servants, and his cats.

  Balthus’s studio in Rossinière, Switzerland, 1990 (photo credit 122.1)

  After a 9:30 breakfast and the reading of the mail, Balthus studied the light conditions of the morning. “This is the one way to know if you will paint today, if the progress into the painting’s mystery will be intense,” he said. In the late morning or just after lunch, Balthus would head to his studio on the outskirts of the nearby village—walking with the aid of a cane or, later, being pushed in a wheelchair by his wife, Setsuko. His painting day always began with a prayer, followed by hours of meditation in front of the canvas. Sometimes he would spend an entire session like this, without even adding a brushstroke. Smoking was essential to this state:

  I’ve always painted while smoking. I am reminded of this habit in photographs from my youth. I intuitively understood that smoking doubled my faculty of concentration, allowing me to be entirely within a canvas. Now that my body is weaker, I smoke less, but I wouldn’t miss for anything the exquisite moments of contemplation before a painting-in-progress, with a cigarette between my lips, helping me to advance into it. There are also happy moments spent smoking after meals or tea; the Countess always places cigarettes on a little night table next to the table where I eat lunch. It’s a great moment of happiness, what Baudelaire called, I believe, “the pleasant hours.”

  At 4:30 or 5:00, Balthus returned to the chalet and joined his wife for a traditional tea service, with jams, fruitcake, and chocolate tarts. After an 8:00 supper, they often settled in the library to watch movies on a wide-screen television. Balthus particularly liked action films, Westerns, and operas.