We all know stories about artists who narrowly escaped oblivion’s fearful grasp.

Vincent Van Gogh was one. Seemingly always just on the threshold of “breaking through” into the elite world of artistic fame and fortune, but dying (however that came about, by his own hand or at the hands of others) having sold only one painting. His late works were viewed for another generation after his death as the fruit of madness rather than evidence of his genius.  And today is there a better known, better loved, more respected artist? 

Whew! Posthumous fame and posthumous fortune!  Success at last, some will say.  Better late than never.  His epitaph now can read, “ahead of his time.”

But was he a success in his own lifetime? Or are we barking up the wrong easel to ask that question at all?

Let’s look at a very different case: Let’s imagine an artist who has “shuffled off this mortal coil,” whose name we will never know, whose works were not championed after his or her death, who worked hard, developed skills as a technician and possessed a singular vision, whose paintings were not seen, never seen, let alone celebrated, perhaps were destroyed upon death. 

Success or failure? 

I would like to propose that neither of these categories help us to understand or evaluate one’s artistic vocation.  

Why? 

Because success and failure are inexorably linked to standards that have nothing to do with the vocation of artistic creation.  

Forty years ago I subscribed to a magazine called “Success.” Now, looking back on the contents of that publication and how seriously I took it, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.  Fortunately I survived striving for success. So did my family. But I wish I had learned the secret of equanimity long before I eventually did.  I wish I had learned the wisdom of Thomas Merton, for example. 

Over the years, through his writings and example, Thomas Merton became my spiritual guide. A Trappist monk whose vocation included writing, Merton wrote a classic autobiography, “The Seven Story Mountain,” which told the story of how this Oxford and Columbia University educated fellow, a friend of luminaries like Mark Van Doren, walked away from his Manhattan Upper West Side associations to become a monk in that most stringent of contemplative orders, the Cistercians of the Strict Order, the Trappists, at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky. By the time of his death at the age of 58 in Thailand (representing his order in an International Interfaith Conference), he numbered among his friends the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dhalai Lama, and had authored some fifty books.

Merton, in one of his books edited and published after his death, told the story of how he was once asked to contribute an essay on success to a project. I’ll let him tell the story: 

“A few years ago a man who was compiling a book entitled ‘Success’ wrote and asked me to contribute a statement on how I got to be a success. I replied indignantly that I was not able to consider myself a success in any terms that had meaning to me. I swore I had spent my life strenuously avoiding success. If I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naïveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, be drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. I heard no more from him, and I am not aware that my reply was published with other testimonials.” (Merton, “Love and Living,” Ed. Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart; New York: Farrah. Straus & Giroux, 1979, p. 10)

I would suggest that the author of that book on “Success” missed a golden opportunity in not following-up on Merton’s irascible and very funny reply. A conversation with this unusual and unusually gifted man might have deepened a book about success into something truly valuable to anyone concerned with doing their very best. 

Merton, you see, understood the secret of vocation. When we follow our gifts, when we are attentive to who we are and what we have a passion for, and when we employ our best abilities in the pursuit of that (whatever that is) we possess something far more satisfying than what our culture calls “success,” a term inevitably ruined by its associations with gain and fame. 

Our vocation may coincide with what we do to scratch out a living. It may not. We may be multi-vocational. As Walt Whitman reminds us, we “contain multitudes.” But, whatever we do, when the deepest streams of our being empower the immediate focus of our attention, this is our internally renewable source of life and joy and meaning, despite what others may think or how the world-at-large may respond to what we do. 

Selling our paintings is wonderful.  Of course. Being recognized as a good artist is grand. Indeed it is. But the measure that matters isn’t either. That standard lies instead in the fulfillment of our vocation, to do what we were made and meant to do, to say what alone we can say in a clear and distinctive and unique voice, to see the world with honesty and to offer what we can with generosity and imagination. Then, whether others recognize our work, or buy it, matters little. 

As the old Stoics once said, our power to find joy and fulfillment comes from within. If that is the case, we are free from the power of all of those things outside of us that we cannot control.

A successful artist is one who has discovered this.