It’s not easy being an artist—especially if you are trying to make a living.  It can seem at times as if the entire world is stacked against you, forcing you to compromise your vision or surrender it altogether in order to put food on the table.  And while the internet has proven to be wonderful for consumers of art, it can be a bit of a double-edged sword for artists themselves.  On the one hand, they can find new audiences from around the world that they may never have found otherwise.  On the other hand, it seems that today it takes something truly extraordinary to cut through all the digital noise—and even when you do break through, you run an even greater risk of your work being copied, pasted, and distributed across the web.  All the blood, sweat, and tears that go into a work of art can instantly evaporate into a fine mist of 0’s and 1’s.

In today’s entertainment-dominated culture, more artists have an opportunity to eek out a living than ever before.  A role that was once fit only for misunderstood iconoclasts is now open to just about anybody.  As a result we have witnessed an unprecedented explosion of creativity online, as it becomes easier and easier for people to explore and express their own artistic proclivities.  At the same time we have witnessed an equally-unprecedented explosion of mediocrity, as any college student with Photoshop installed on their laptop can fancy themselves an “artist”, making it that much more difficult for genuine talent to shine through the dreck.

A lot has changed over the years for artists.  But one thing has remained true since time immemorial: in order to be a truly great artist, you must live your entire life as your ultimate work, your friends and family as your grand masterpiece, your every breath as your finest creative denouement.  Now more than ever, an artist must strike just the right balance between inspiration and occupation, between creativity and commodity, between the idealism of form and the pragmatism of function.  It is a dance which, when we see it danced well, lifts us all out of the mundanity of daily life, offering us new eyes and new perspectives through which we can see the world in an entirely new way.

Bryce Widom is an artist facing exactly these sorts of challenges.  Already an accomplished painter, designer, and illustrator in his own right (as well as a beloved part of the Boulder/Denver integral community), Bryce is now beginning a new phase of his artistic career, which is already culminating in his beautiful new art gallery 1000 Views of God (featured here at Integral Life.)  In this dialogue he and Stuart Davis discuss his own story of cultivating his identity as an artist—an often painful, often exhilarating process of surrendering again and again to his deepest purpose and vision.