The Third Path

I’ve been listening to The Art Biz podcast by Alyson Stanfield lately. For those who aren’t familiar with her work, she’s an art consultant and coach who speaks with artists about the realities of building and sustaining an art career.

What I appreciate about her approach is how grounded it feels. The conversations aren’t only about the art world or the art market. They’re about the actual lives of artists — how we work, how we make decisions and how our careers change alongside our lives.

And the more I move through my own career, the more I realize there are so many ways to be an artist.

There’s the path we’re most familiar with: galleries, exhibitions, museums, recognition. The trajectory we tend to associate with a “successful artist.”

But especially now, there are so many other possibilities. There are artists who are also designers. Artists who are chefs. Artists who teach, write, collaborate, make objects, build communities, and work across disciplines. There are hybrid careers and paths that don’t fit neatly into any particular category.

A recent episode of The Art Biz got me thinking about this in a different way.

Alyson was talking about what she calls The Third Path.

She described three general paths an artist might take.

The first is the career-driven path.

You’re pursuing more exhibitions, more galleries, more museums, more recognition, more opportunities. There’s a sense of forward momentum and a desire to continue reaching the next level. This is probably the version of an art career we hear about most because, naturally, there’s a lot of energy and visibility around it.

The second path is quitting.

Not quitting as failure, but simply reaching a point where you realize you’ve given what you wanted to give to something. Maybe you’re burned out. Maybe you’ve changed. Maybe another life is calling you.

I’ve watched people I know do this. A good friend of mine recently found herself burned out from the career she had been pursuing. Then a friend invited her to help with a project at their company. She said yes, and unexpectedly found herself entering an entirely different world.

She doesn’t know whether she’ll stay on this new path forever. That’s not really the point.

What mattered was discovering there were other ways of working and being.

And then there’s the third path.

This is the one that perked my ears up.

The third path is for artists who aren’t necessarily interested in continually chasing conventional markers of success, but who also have absolutely no desire to stop making art.

They still want an art practice.

They still want to make the work.

They’re just not sure they want the life that comes with constantly pursuing more.

There are all kinds of reasons someone might find themselves in this space. Motherhood. Care-giving. Health. Age. A shift in priorities. Or simply realizing that the version of success they once wanted doesn’t fit anymore.

I realized as I was listening:

I think I’m somewhere in this third path right now.

In my twenties, I was incredibly driven. Then much of my late twenties and thirties became complicated by being sick and simply not having the energy to pursue everything in the way I imagined.

Now I’m in my forties, coming into a different relationship with my work.

And the landscape around me is changing too.

AI. Social media. The internet. Galleries struggling and closing. The ways people discover and collect art, changing. The possibilities for how artists can work becoming wider and, in some ways, stranger.

At the same time, I’m finding myself returning to things I once moved away from.

I’m writing again. I’m coming back to Substack and wanting to approach it like a publication: somewhere for longer conversations, ideas and substance rather than simply posting things.

I’m with a gallery I love. I don’t know how long this relationship will continue, but I am grateful to have a relationship where I can share my work with others.

I’m finding myself returning to design work. For a while, I had this idea that if I was going to be an artist, I needed to focus exclusively on my art.

Artwork for Masako Tomiya, Kito, published by Chose Commune

But design is art.

It’s simply another way of making.

My background is in graphic design and music, and lately I’ve been rediscovering how much I love collaboration. For a long time, I wanted to work alone. Now I’m finding it incredibly inspiring to work with people from different backgrounds, having conversations and imagining new projects together.

I’m also integrating my spiritual practice more deeply into what I make.

All of these things are beginning to coexist.

And I started thinking:

Maybe the trajectory I imagined for myself isn’t actually the path I want anymore.

Maybe it isn’t about climbing.

Maybe it’s about expanding.

Because growth tends to be thought of as a linear word, with a graph beginning at the lower corner and moving steadily upward.

More recognition.
More money.
More followers.
More exhibitions.
More success.

Up, up, up.

But what if growth could move outward instead?

I keep imagining something closer to a burst of light.

At the center are your core gifts, values, interests and experiences. And rather than abandoning them in pursuit of the next level, you begin radiating outward from them.

One thing connects to another.

Art connects to design.

Design connects to collaboration.

Collaboration opens a conversation.

A conversation becomes a project.

Spiritual practice enters the artwork.

Writing changes the way you understand the painting.

Motherhood changes the way you see the world.

Care-giving shifts the way you understand love, time or presence.

And eventually these seemingly separate parts of your life begin to touch one another.

That, too, is growth.

It just isn’t linear growth.

Maybe it’s nonlinear expansion.

And perhaps that’s what this third path means to me.

The external trajectory might not look dramatically different. Someone looking from the outside might not see the conventional markers that tell them, Oh, this person is moving up.

But internally, something enormous might be happening.

Are you becoming more yourself?

Are you more connected to what you’re making?

Are you curious?

Are you fulfilled?

Are you expanding as a human being?

Don’t those things count as measures of success too?

I think they do.

More and more, I’m beginning to believe they might be more important, at least for me, than the external validation of growth.

And I think this extends far beyond artists.

Many of us reach moments in our lives when the path we’ve been following no longer feels quite right. That doesn’t necessarily mean we need to abandon it entirely.

Maybe we simply need to stop assuming there is only one direction to go.

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

I recently came across a quote from Rick Rubin about the order of importance when creating. The idea, as I understood it, was something like this:

First comes the inspiration.

Then comes your relationship to it. Does it resonate with you? Does it feel meaningful?

And only after that comes sharing it with the world.

That order has stayed with me.

Because I think we often reverse it.

We begin by wondering how something will be received. How it will look. Whether it will succeed. Whether people will understand it.

And then we work backward toward ourselves.

What if we reversed that?

What is calling me?

Does it feel true?

Does it make me feel connected, fulfilled, curious, excited?

And then:

How might I bring this into the world?

That feels very different.

If you had asked me about all of this in my twenties, I probably would have said, Nope. I want that upward trajectory.

And that would have been okay too.

Maybe in your twenties you want an upward trajectory and in your forties you suddenly want to radiate out.

Maybe you want the gallery career.

Maybe you want to leave your career entirely.

Maybe you want some unique fourth path that none of us have named yet.

All of those are viable.

The important thing, I think, is recognizing that there isn’t only one way.

We don’t have to feel deflated because our lives don’t resemble the trajectory we once imagined for ourselves.

The disconnect happens when we stop listening to ourselves and begin building a life primarily around how it appears from the outside.

So lately, the question I’ve been asking myself isn’t:

Am I moving upwards?

It’s:

Am I still expanding?

And right now, I think I am.

Maybe more than ever.

I’d love to know where you find yourself at this point in your life.

Are you climbing?

Are you expanding?

Are you leaving one path and entering another?

Or are you somewhere that doesn’t have a name yet?

Whatever it is, I think there’s something powerful in allowing ourselves to recognize that we are individual, unique beings. Our lives are going to take different paths.

Maybe the goal isn’t to make them look the same.

Maybe it’s to become more fully ourselves within them.