We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bridget Quinn a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Bridget, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
This is such an interesting question, because I think resilience is everything. In my experience it’s far more essential, and more indicative of success, than any inborn talent. But where it comes from? I guess I believe that resilience can be learned and it’s something you train as a writer, or any artist, in the same way you might train at a sport. I was a competitive swimmer growing up and played other sports passionately. I learned to just show up and do the work. In any sport, at any age, you often test yourself in some kind of challenge and you might not achieve what you hoped, you often don’t. But you just get back out there and get at it. And in both training to, say, swim, or training to write, there’s a lot of pleasure, even joy, in the process. The work itself becomes its own reward. That helps you keep going. The work becomes part of who you are.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I’m a writer who is also an art historian and so I often write about art, whether as an author, a journalist, or critic. I’ve published three books that all involve women’s history and women artists. My most recent book is Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry and Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. It’s about a once-celebrated painter in Paris at the time of Marie-Antoinette and the French Revolution, and the fellow painter she was pitted against. Think Hamilton or Amadeus, but women artists.
I’m passionate about art as both “product” – the object itself, whether painting, book, poem or song – and the activity of art-making and what makes an artist.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1. Gnaw your own bone. This comes from my mis-remembering Thoreau, but I’ve said it for years and I’m sticking with it. The same way it pays to stick with the thing that compels you, impels you, calls to you, endlessly interests you, even terrifies you. The thing you cannot get away from or do without. Embrace it, even if it embarrasses you. Especially if it embarrasses you. Love it, drill down to its marrow, never let it go.
Thoreau’s quote, by the way, is: “Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”
2. Nothing is wasted.
Whatever you create has value, from daily journal entries to “failed” novels to filling a sketch pad with the scene outside your window. The magic is in the doing. Fill notebooks, sketchbooks, the margins of books. Just do it. It will come back to you.
3. Create community.
One of the greatest joys of the creative life is not the solitude required for creation – though that can be fun, too – but the incredible people and their amazing work you get to experience and celebrate. It’s a wonder and real shot in the arm when your friends publish books or have shows or do cool things in the world of all kinds. And it is essential to have people you trust, who have been there, to hear fears and complaints that might sound like ingratitude to anyone else. It is also essential to have people to cheer wildly at the small victories along the way. And it is a hell of a lot of fun.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
When I was in my mid-twenties, someone told me about a recently-published book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I wanted, more than anything in the world, to become a writer. I’d decided not to pursue the PhD in art history I’d started working toward and to throw myself at writing instead. Except, how exactly did one do that? I bought the book, which I found eye-rolling and hokey … and then I did everything it suggested. I started writing three pages every morning, taking myself on “artist dates” and on long walks. Simple, actionable, accountable. Three decades later, I still do them. There’s a lot of power in just showing up for art, day after day.
Contact Info:
- Website: bridgetquinnauthor.com
- Instagram: @bquinnterest
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bridget.quinn.90
- Twitter: @bquinnterest
Image Credits
Amy Perl [top first two photos only]
