Like I once asked myself as an artist, you might also ask yourself:
Does my work matter?
How do I keep going when doubt is constant?
How do I sustain a consistent practice?
How do I build a life around my work?
How do I make a living from my work?
What do others think about my work?
What am I willing to sacrifice, or not sacrifice, for this work?
…
I witnessed the same struggles repeating across creatives in different forms.
The medium changes.
The questions do not.
These are not personal failures. They are realities of the life as a creative.
For a long time, I felt the need to create something more precise and more profound. Not another publication about creativity in general or quick tips, but an outlet to share my knowledge and experience. An attempt to articulate and explore patterns I kept observing in my own life as an artist and consultant and across creative disciplines and cultures.
What I do know is that living life as a creative is often misunderstood. Especially in relation to artists, I have experienced that it is still framed by others through outdated ideas of talent, inspiration or luck.
I grew up hearing things like:
Your art only pays when you become famous.
You need to become famous before you can be a real artist.
You will only become famous after you are dead.
Art does not pay.
I do not agree with that framing.
The world around the work
What matters most to me is not only the creative work itself, but everything around it.
Especially as an artist, you are not only creating artworks that sell. You are gradually building a body of work, a reputation and a world in which those artworks can exist.
After studying fine art and completing my Master Class (Meisterschüler) degree, I spent over a decade in the high-end luxury fashion industry while developing my own artistic practice and visual language. Across these different roles, one question kept returning: how does my creative work become sustainable over time?
That question gradually led me beyond the artwork itself towards resilience, clarity, structure and strategy, and eventually to the understanding that management, in this sense, becomes a creative act, translating vision into form and action.
Today, whether I work as a fine artist, an entrepreneur, president of an international art association or director of a foundation, I am still exploring the same question.
Once an artwork is finished, most people move immediately to the next artwork. I did that myself.
But since 2024, I have deliberately stepped away from intensive periods of practical artistic work and from creating larger artworks because I am currently building my own gallery, Musedra. This involves a great deal of (creative) digital work, and I currently spend most of my working time on the computer. This is a self-imposed path I have chosen.
I postponed further practical artistic work to “prepare the crop” for what comes next.
Building a gallery or this publication is not my final purpose as an artist. I am building my own unique world. Musedra is part of it. The Creative Core is part of it.
That is how I came to understand that the space between creative acts deserves attention.
And this publication lives in that space.
Structures and gaps
Creativity does not end when the visible work is finished. It expands in the structures of our life. It continues in the gap between output and identity.
That is how I think about creativity in a broader sense:
When we zoom out, it becomes a continuous negotiation between what you create and what your work slowly makes of you, between who you are and who you are becoming.
This includes, among other things:
Resilience and decision-making under uncertainty,
Long-term identity formation and transformation,
Strategic thinking about visibility and survival,
Repetition and discipline without external enforcement.
These are the invisible structures of the life as a creative. They are rarely visible, but they shape everything: foundation, mindset, strategy, execution and impact.
Living as a creative is not a romantic condition. Beyond talent, it requires passion, courage, discipline, planning, strategy, repetition, entrepreneurship and long-term thinking.
And most of all, creative work unfolds over long stretches of solitude.
At a certain point, I began to understand that creative progress rarely follows straight lines. As an artist, you sometimes need to take shortcuts, walk triangular paths or venture onto paths that nobody has walked before. You need to discover hidden paths and, ultimately, find your own and make your own map.
What I write frames the life as a creative as system of transformation.
It is not about waiting for conditions to be right. You need to learn to create through the storm.
It is one of the most uncertain, disciplined and demanding ways of living. Being a freelancer is already a difficult path, and being a freelance artist is an even more demanding one.
I will explore in this publication becoming and overcoming: how creative people move through uncertainty, develop strength and build meaning through their work over time.
The Creative Core is made for people who have chosen that path. It is not a metaphor for something abstract. It is the place where imagination, reality and action converge.
Creativity becomes visible when this system is in motion:
Ideas become artworks.
Artworks become memories.
Memories become identities.
Identities shape culture.
Culture produces new ideas.
Creativity does not end when the work is complete. It has only just begun.
With every essay, we will uncover another part of what it takes not only to create meaningful work, but to build a life that can sustain it.
~ Fides Linien
I also place a lot of value on the role of the creative in relation to the mental, emotional and spiritual health of our cultures. As creatives we have the power to influence our readerships and our audiences deeply enough in an emotional or intellectual sense that we alter them. They may go on to behave in a different manner than they otherwise would have had they not experienced the meaning they found in our work.
I have very much enjoyed reading your piece.