Artists and Soulmaking | Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation
Navigating the Treacherous Chasm Between the Soul and the Marketplace.
““You’ve done their soul work for them, in a way.””
Artists and Soulmaking | Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation
6031 words - original talk, untruncated direct from the video.
What Drives The Artist?
What motivates artists to paint, poets to write poetry, and musicians to create unique and original music? Throughout my career, there have been many times that I've examined why I've lost motivation at various times. Any artist that's been in the game long enough—and I do mean an artist that is creating something, and therefore that's why I said poets, musicians, you know, painters—they will get to this place where they lose their mojo and they want to know how to get it back. So, I would like to just sort of explore this a little bit in this chat.
I'm more interested in asking what that list, that huge list of 10,000 reasons and motivations to do our creative work, really means. I reckon that the big list could be sorted out into just a couple of metaphoric categories. What I really bring it down to, in a simplistic way, is that there's the extrinsic or external motivators—you know, things that pull you out to do your work and motivate you to do it from outside sources—and then there's the intrinsic or internal motivation.
The Two Core Motivations: Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic
I remember when I kind of came across that idea; it was in some test they did with children where they were kids that loved creating art, and they did it because they loved doing it. Then they started to reward them with something for doing their work, and then they removed the rewards. They found that the children no longer actually really wanted to do their creative work because the reward wasn't there. So, it was quite an interesting experiment.
Let's have a look at that from the artist's point of view, because I only thought of that later after I'd written most of this down, and I thought, "Oh, so, you know, artists are really just human beings struggling with the same sort of things." But for artists, it's a little bit more.
The Foundational Question: Who Am I Creating For?
The most obvious first question that we can ask ourselves is, who am I doing this for? Who am I painting or creating for? Who am I writing for? When you ask this question—and this is an exercise to dwell on—you might find that answering it is quite intimidating, confronting, or actually really quite hard. Your answer will probably pop out instantly, of course, but you'll know that it's probably not quite authentic or genuine if you just reflect on it for a minute.
For instance, if we say, "Well, I'm doing it for myself," why do we even care to be labeled as an artist or have our work seen or read? If we're really doing it for ourselves, why do we care about others seeing it? Why would we let it bother us that we go to our grave and no one's actually ever seen our sketches? If we're really doing it for ourselves, then that is pretty much the only audience that we need, right? Ourselves. It's our inner work.
In this case, there's no reason to be trying to establish a style or a brand or even to sign your work. Why do you need to be constantly producing more work and have a consistency in your work when it's really just for yourself? There is just no—well, there isn't any judgment unless you start to think about what you're doing in your creative machinations in regards to the outside eyes looking at it. That formula or discipline around your work is only needed when you're working into an expectant marketplace that is seeking a predictable and reliable formula. No matter that the art world always waffles on about, "Oh, look at our creatives," what they really want is a recognizable style so they can put you in a box, and that is pretty much what success is built from. There's plenty of examples of that that we could go through.
If you're really doing it for yourself, there's just no reason to put it out there or even get feedback from your mom, your wife, or the marketplace, let alone trying to sell anything. I mean, if we're doing it for ourselves and then someone comes along and accidentally sees it and places a value on it—for example, they want to buy it or they give you some praise—and that might have happened because they actually saw it by accident, then how does that make you feel about your own intimate exploration, which is absolutely private and nothing to do with anyone else's judgment? That's a very important thing to think about as we're working all this out. Spend some time on it.
The Inner Sanctum: Creating for Oneself
So, the artist has done this thing for themselves, you know, for their own spiritual satisfaction. I can really relate to that. As a young teenager, I created all these really crazy, wicked drawings that were quite bizarre, and I was doing that for my own reasons. I didn't really have any idea that anyone would see them. Since then, I might have shown them in my older age to people, saying, "What is going on there?" But at the time, I was not even thinking about being an artist. I wrote all this existential poetry, and it was just for this thing inside me that I had to do.
When I did create those things, it felt like—I don't know, I can actually really remember—it felt like freedom. It was like I was speaking in this language that really did extend me to my fullest capacity. Speaking English just wasn't enough. I just needed to be able to take the words, the poetry, and redesign them in ways that were more fitting to the way things felt. And in regards to the imagery, it was exactly the same. It was just being able to make imagery that was not realistic in any way to make it have this feeling that I was feeling, and that created a great sense of satisfaction for me. If you had have asked me back then who I was doing it for, it would have been a no-brainer. I was certainly not doing it for anyone in the outside world. In fact, the very act of creating those poems and pictures was something I was doing as a counter to the outside world, which I just found to be a place of nonsense. By doing those drawings, those poems, I actually found sanity. It was, I guess, the thing that probably saved my sanity.
The Garden Breached: When the Outside World Enters
So, the artist has done this thing for themselves, and then someone has seen it and placed a monetary or emotional value on it. I'm saying that it's kind of like the snake enters the private Garden of Eden, you know, which is in yourself.
Why is this even a problem, or why should we spend some time thinking about this? Well, it's very important to slow down and ponder it, as it happens very early in the artist's career generally, and we forget about it. But it might help us later in our career when we get stuck or feel we are selling ourselves out by only painting the things, say, that the market wants and not what we want. We can go back to this time and work some things out to do with the intimacy that we had with ourselves and how we used that for spiritual development without really being kind of ‘sonically’ aware, you know, sort of having all these fancy words around it. We were just doing it naturally, especially as little kids.
The Artist's Social Contract: Soul-Making for the Collective
Usually, moving back to the old snake-in-the-garden analogy or metaphor, the entry of the community or commercial value being placed on your private thing happens, and that changes everything. It's quite remarkably like the Garden of Eden story, but why does it happen? I mean, why can't these people get their own private art thing happening in their own dungeon? Generally, why someone else who didn't do the thing places value on your thing is because, very simply, we are not an island as a human being. We rely on community and family. Even we lone wolves have our moments where we do.
Now, your own creative experience, which you recorded by doing a drawing or writing a passage and which somehow got leaked or shared, will most certainly resonate with other humans. That's because we are a collective-type deal, and it's going to come out. You're not unique. What you do is important, but it is not so supersonically unique that others can't relate to it. You've got to trust that. Not everybody, and there's so many different types of people... I mean, depending on your nature and the nature of your material ponderings, it might resonate more with some than others.
So it's not really that hard to understand how people could relate to your artistic interpretation of how you feel. And if they don't have the capacity to put their own feelings into imagery or words, they're going to want to buy your thing. They want that reminder that it exists, and you've created it. You've done their soul work for them, in a way. That's how it's often valued. It doesn't mean they're not doing their soul work, because by their very interaction with it, they're actually experiencing it. But you've really got to start to see yourself as really inseparable from that body of the human race and why you're so important. You're a bit like, I don't know, a limb; you're more like a heart or something, and you've got to perform your function as a full-blown artist in that soul-making mode for the sake of the world. You know, it's much more important than just yourself and your own needs.
The person that's valued your work and, you know, put their money where their value is, they marvel and they want to covet the material manifestation of what they can't seem to create. They want to buy your stuff, right? Same for music and all forms of art. People consume it rabidly, you know, downloading song after song. It's because of the way it transforms them. It's why a society of non-artists supports the artists, whether or not they're conscious of why they do it. It's kind of like why art seems to get this sort of supersonic value in a society when it's healthy and not being broken down.
A Dangerous Profession: Why Authoritarians Target the Artist
And it's why they usually come after the artists and the poets when dictators and, you know, Bolsheviks and the rest of them are trying to get rid of some sort of cultural representation and replace it with their body politic. They usually go after the artists and the poets and the philosophers first. You know, we're the first ones in the ditch, I'm sorry to say, but that's how it is.
I know I annoy a lot of my clients and possibly followers because I'm always on about the globalists and all this stuff. There is a reason for it, and it's not disconnected from me being an artist and caring about other artists. So let's get this clear, just so we understand what they're trying to throw in the ditch. If we go back and look at any of those control systems that come through as governments, it's quite obvious that communism was where the state wanted to be the supreme authority. So when we look at today's version of that, we've got globalists who are basically—it's like a kind of a mix-up. So we've got the globalists who are the self-appointed dictators who use the tool of communism to control everyone else.
And what does this spiritless or soulless entity need? They need to have themselves as the ultimate authority over all this nonsense about the soul. So when an artist, or a poet, or an artist does their work and has this inclination to examine their internal processes, spirituality, however you want to put it, and then they accidentally or deliberately share that with the community, it triggers in the collective psyche of the community that this is actually a possibility—that you can have an authority that's greater than the state. So that's why these artistic people who do actually do real work, not just create decoration through repetitive commercial work all the time, these people are a real threat, and they have to be removed. That allows the current power monkey to be able to say, "Well, we are going to look after you. We are the supreme and ultimate source of truth." I think we heard that more recently in the last couple of years a few times too many.
Inner Work vs. Outer Work: Know the Difference
This is why I think it's really important for us as artists to understand how important it is that we do our inner work and understand the difference of that inner process, which is a very intimate or intrinsic kind of process. And then know when we move outside and it gets shared, that the reason it has value is because you're actually a kind of a channel to do that work for the collective community, who may not have the typology or the access or the inclination to look inside the way you might naturally. That has really been something that is particular to the human race for all eternity. There's always been those who do that inner work for the whole of the community, and then they share it. In the old days, they would have some sort of label, such as the shaman or something like that.
But what happens to us as artists and poets is we kind of get commercialized very quickly. And it is a necessary evil, I suppose, but it's also a good thing. And then we can lose touch with where we were coming from in the first place. That's pretty much what this is all about.
So that's why, coming back to the ditch theory, you know, you probably wonder why they grabbed all the artists when you're thinking about artists being the likes of Damien Hirst, who's just painting dots. I mean, you know, what harm has he done to anyone? Or someone painting nice landscapes. They certainly didn't bother with those people. But the idea is that if an artist is digging into what makes us tick and where our inspiration... they're evidencing—the artist is evidence of something else deeper and more possible coming out of the human soul, just as the poet is or the writer. And it used to be the academic, even though now it seems like the academic more so is spouting the propaganda for these systems.
More Than Just You: The Artist’s Role in Regenerating Humanity
If you're just painting at the moment and doing mostly work that is decorative, you're probably wondering what the blazes I'm on about here. But as I keep saying, the whole idea of me having this discussion with myself and you is to try and get you to see that there is a reason why you're artistically inclined. It's mostly to do with the fact that most of you have a propensity to have an internal dialogue, and that internal dialogue is evidence of something more than just the plastic world around you. And that occasionally we lose our footing when we have too much of the extrinsic demand or the external world demand, and we forget what we're doing.
While you may not make money or be popular if you make that journey back to your internal dialogue, or the dialogue of the soul speaking to whoever you perceive to be inside that dialogue, the key is that when you do make the effort to have that discussion—if you feel like you've lost your way—then that dialogue is a most important thing to do. Not just for yourself, but for the collective unconscious, if you like. It's actually for the human race, so it's bigger than you. It's not just about you coming out and streaming your inner dialogue onto canvas at all. We could even say that that's pretty much what the Bible was made up of, which was an inner dialogue being streamed, and all the other great tomes.
It's not that. It's more so that you take an action in the world, whether it be with your pen or your brush or your typewriter. And that action that you take, because you're a physical being, an essential being, is the way you actually translate what's going on in your mind or your soul-mind connection onto a medium. And that medium then can be shared. I'm not much interested in this, you know, AI with putting chips in your head; that's just all nonsense. But this is actually the real organic process that is the highest value. And when you do that, you often will create artwork, and it may not be intended for your commercial market, but you will be able to dialogue with what you're creating—writing, painting—on a much more satisfying and deeper level. And that's actually where you will regenerate. That's where you'll be doing your soul work. And of course, you may need to adapt that in some way for the commercial market if you want to take it that way, because it's a whole different world, as we'll discuss.
But I think the key message I'm trying to get across is that it is important work. And if you lose your way, this is how you get back to that core self, that core key point of creation. Most artists know this, but we do forget it, and we just need that little reminder because we get so hooked up with performance in the external world that we place very little value on this process. We know we can tap into it, say, when we have a drink or listen to some loud music, and that does tend to put us in a form of trance where we lower the conscious resistance to that state. But I think that it'd be nice if we had more awareness around what it actually is.
Also, what's under threat from the current global nonsense going on and all of its force of, you know, the terrorism they're throwing at us around, "AI, AI, AI is better than you, AI can surpass you, it's going to be all through you, and you know, you're not even going to be human anymore." I mean, that's pure, unadulterated psychological terrorism. It's designed to intimidate you, to make you feel small, pathetic, and useless. Don't stand for it. It's complete nonsense. They can't replace you. That's your proof of how important you are in a society and how important it is for you to stay connected to your heart and to find a way back there if you get lost now and again. And that's really what I'm talking about in this talk: getting back to the intrinsic work that you're doing.
The Perils of Praise: How Rewards Can Compromise the Artist
When it meets the extrinsic world, and where you're suddenly going from having your own internal experience to realizing that others want to access your experience for themselves, what happens? Once this interaction occurs and the society, the non-creating society, places value on your manifestation of your inner work—your soulful type paintings or writings—is that this sets up a completely different dynamic for how you are approaching your work. And that's when the trouble starts. It's also where the reward comes in, but it's also, you know, unfortunately, the opposite as well.
It doesn't seem like trouble at first, as we suddenly find that we're being revered and rewarded for spilling our guts. We do more, but we're not doing it just for us as an existential need to express something personal and intimate like we were when we first started. We're doing it because others want it. And of course, this places reward around our performances. Money and awards or praise is then attached for us to expressing ourselves with the medium, whatever it is.
Of course we want to please, you know, because who does not like money and praise, right? But the trouble is, we become kind of like dancing puppets. We dance to the tune of the clients, the galleries, the judges, all the art boards, and the critics. We do so, and we are rewarded for doing so. So why wouldn't we? You'd be crazy not to. It's about survival and thriving—if you do, actually thriving—and you get rewarded the more you do. There's plenty of examples of artists that have just taken it to the maximum stretching point, such as Damien Hirst, where it's no longer art, but it's actually just a production factory. And that is really the hard core of it. That's what makes the world go around.
The Craftsman’s Trap: When Art Becomes a Production Line
At that point, being an artist doesn't make you any different to just being a good craftsperson who can turn out 500 perfect table legs a day, you know, just all matching the same. Just occasionally, you might go from turning table legs to chair legs, or you could paint that seascape that's so popular from a different angle, or maybe add a pomegranate to your still life and change the tablecloth. But you never change the signature style, and everyone's happy in the marketplace and Bob's your uncle, wink wink, you know? And we call that a successful artist. The galleries love it. "Consistent and disciplined," they will say. Lots of sales. "Don't worry, Mrs. Epstein, you missed the last one, but Vincent here can do you a commission exactly the same with your special twist."
Okay, okay, I know. I've been in the game long enough to know it very well, and I have benefited, as many of my very long-standing, successful artist friends have. I am talking from experience. You really are a champion as an artist. You're creating or offering a service, and it's being valued in the community by others. And here comes the paradox: therefore, you're rewarded for your service. So, well done. But that is pretty much how it all ends up going off track eventually.
That reward turns into feeling almost like a form of bribery and compromise. You feel like a prostitute who's being blackmailed. Every time we slam the table and say, "Enough," the shimmering, gold-wielding blob starts whispering in our ear, "We will only pay you if you give us what we want." So, you decide not to be a rebel today, and you just save that for when you've got some private time to play around and do your real work and get back to yourself. So the shimmering, goldy blob that's in your ear is not the lovely, sacred, soulful muse that would talk to you when you were doing that work private for yourself.
You find yourself back to that old desire to return to the private cave under your bed where you made that stuff just for yourself originally. The whole world of success in the artist's life feels at times—after a long career, mind you—like a form of capture or hostage-taking by your market. If you are only new to an arts career, you may not even understand what I'm talking about here, so just keep it in your back pocket for later.
You can see how this gets very quickly distorted and morphed into something other than you being a happy little artist in your studio creating stuff. It really is the hardcore reality of long-time successful artists, but also artists that have given up because they felt this compromise and they couldn't keep doing their work because they wanted to stay in that soul-making state of being. And that kind of kicked them out of being viable as a selling artist.
The Compromise: How Do We Live With It?
While this doesn't sound very romantic and probably isn't very inspiring for you to hear this, I think it's really important to have clarity around how this all happens so that we can do something about it constructively.
So, when we ask ourselves the question of "Who am I doing this for?" and maybe we answered, "I'm doing it for my audience, my market, the gallery, or the world," whatever that is, then how does that feel as opposed to having, say, replied, "I'm doing it for myself"? It sounds very logical, doesn't it, that you're doing it for yourself and you're doing it for the world or the public? But when you split it up and start to look at it a little bit more closely, we can start to see why things go off track. And I do think that we need a little differentiation because we can't sort problems out unless we literally sort them out, as in sorting them into different categories.
Just sit with that reply, though, for a few minutes or hours if you like. Don't ask yourself another question other than that one until you really absorb what that means. And that was that we said we were doing it for the public, the gallery, the client, etc.—the outside world, for demand. So we just take that answer at its face value. In its most simplistic form, it means that you're a person in service of the public. So let's just be really clear about that. You're not being this arty-farty, crazy person; you're just doing a service for the public. You're using your craft—because it is a craft when you have that approach. You are carefully repeating a formula. You may change it slightly, but you are pretty much sticking with the style that everyone kind of thinks is coming out of you and that they're celebrating and they're rewarding you for. You're using this craft to create products and objects for the public, and therefore, that's what you do.
There's nothing wrong with that. However, the best thing is to just make sure that you're clear that that is what you're doing and that's all it is. It's just what it is. Settling with that in full sunlight should remove some of the confusion where you may have been blaming others for causing you to feel compromised or even blaming yourself. I've said it myself. My friends have said it. "Oh, God, you know, got to do this commission," or, "The gallery wants me to do these pieces, and you know, it's got this theme that I have to follow." "Oh, you know," so, "Oh boy," you know, that can get really weird. But we've just got to remember it's our choice to serve the public. So why would we be feeling resentful if we have decided we're doing it for others? We're not doing it for our own inner needs when we say that we're doing it for the gallery or the market.
Of course, you might also be enjoying the sensual process in the creation of the products for the public, like many focused craftspeople find. That's great, and I imagine you're not really needing to do this investigation into your motivation. So why are you listening to this? Get back to work. When I ask, "Who are you doing this for?" you might have said, "Well, I'm doing it for me because it's meditative and it relaxes me." So fine, that is absolutely fine, but you know, it's not quite what we're talking about here. So as I said, get back to work and enjoy your process.
Because even artists that are doing it under existential crisis are possibly enjoying the process of slapping and slashing the paint onto the canvas. There is real therapeutic value in that. And even artists that are doing a repetitive formula are often very, very much more comfortable with being in that state. They don't want to be chopping and changing and coming up with new ideas and having all that emotional turmoil. They just want to say, "Okay, I need to paint 10 paintings of a still life, and I'm really excited that I've got apples on the table today and tomorrow I'm going to have a banana on the table." You know what I mean. A lot of artists simply use the occupation as a form of escapism. There are as many types of artists as there are species of flower, and they all have their own reasons.
But really, what I'm talking about here is for those artists that find themselves feeling compromised by their commercial success or, even the other way around, that they can't become commercial in order to make money from their art because they feel like it's a compromise to their true inner voice or their dialogue with the muse. This is what this discussion is about. It's about separating the issues and saying, how can we play the field—both fields? How can we move back and forwards with more ease? A little bit like the Greek god Hermes or the Roman god Mercury, who was able to move between the upper world and the underworld with great ease.
If the "Who am I doing it for?" is not for the outside world and that's not a satisfactory conclusion for you, then we might need to review who we are doing this art process for. So if I then say, "Okay, I'm doing it for myself," then I need to ask myself, why do I need to do this for myself? What purpose is it for? Why did you first become attracted to the process of art for a kind of therapeutic expression in the first place? Can you remember? Now we're getting back to the Garden of Eden, or innocence in the path of the soul.
The Path Forward: Protecting the Sacred Inner World
The problem with being in that mode of being the creator of fine art products is that if you let your ego go on to thinking that it is making some sort of unique genius product like the work of a unique, original art, when it really is a market-driven product, then that's when you might find that you have hooked up your heroic ego, who has a contract or job in society or to the family, and have mistaken it for your spiritual development. That's why it feels so dumb and empty. You need to get back to your true spiritual calling now and again, not necessarily all the time. It gets a bit tiring.
The more successful you are as an artist—be it a visual artist, musician, writer, poet—the harder and deeper this void can become to move between. So you do an occasional bit of soul-searching and work out ways to be clear about when you are being a making machine and when you are doing your soul work. Occasionally, artists are able to stand with a leg in each camp or on both sides of the cliff and pull it off magnificently, but rarely, if ever, can they stay there for longer than a few magnificent moments. There is too much bulldust out there in the art world where we are judged as either having it, losing it, or used to have it, or whatever. We are measured based on this not-so-mysterious dilemma that we have to deal with in our unique occupation, full of ups and downs and massive risks.
And congratulations again to you for having the courage to become an artist. It is not a safe bed, but it can be a lifetime occupation with a bit of careful management and understanding of your mental balance and your soul needs, and how you must attend to that work like any human being, I suppose. But for artists, it starts to get attached to our work. The soul work gets attached to the work that we do in the world, in the public world. So you've got to be careful. You've got to be aware. It is actually dangerous not to be aware, because if you start to mistake what's going on in the outer world and how you're being judged for your performance, your creative work, and you haven't been able to differentiate your public work from your soul work, you could very easily take the judgment or the critique in the outer world as if someone is critiquing who you really are in your deepest self.
This is where everything goes wrong. So in order to have a really strong sense of self in the outer world, you've got to really understand that who you are inside, on the inner side of your creative perspective, is not actually for public discussion. It's nobody's business. So the caution is all around understanding the difference and the separation that you've got to have there in your mind. Where things go terribly wrong is where people mix it all up, and then they think that because someone criticizes their work, they're actually not approving of your very existence on this planet. It's like the ultimate murder. It's a murder from the outside world that you're letting happen to yourself. It's an assault, unless you protect your own inner world.
So that's the motivation for understanding this, in my view, is that the more sensitive you are, the more you need to understand how this works. And I guess some people seem to have a tougher skin, you might say, or some people seem to bounce back better even after criticism. Some people become more defiant with criticism. It doesn't matter how you go about it. I think the key is that if you can make sure you're clear about the difference between these two things, and that every now and again you can bring out something that is your true self coming from your core self and deliver it to the public in the form of a product. But the critique or the non-approval of that thing that you bring out—which could be that you simply haven't had it seen by the right people or that you're not in the right marketplace—is most certainly no reason to then start judging yourself.
We need to be very clear that how we measure ourselves deeply internally is nothing to do with how the outer world measures the product of your activities. This is why it's very important to understand the difference and not to mix it up. Yes, it's important that you bring forward some of this mysterious stuff that you do pick up on that inner journey, but it is never to be confused with the marketplace and all the things that go on out there. That's for outside. Inside is sacred.
You're going to fall in and out of the chasm of inspiration and favor in the world. It's normal and natural. So make sure there are safe spaces to land and you know what's going on when you do fall, and that you have enough, I don't know, money in the bank or a safety net of some sort, if you can, for when you need to retreat to the monastery to recharge. Stop judging yourself or even others for having expectations of what you should be doing for yourself, and take responsibility for your spiritual needs by remembering how you used to negotiate them in private, away from the job world.
Final Thoughts
Anyway, take care, artist friends. I hope there was something in there you can extract and use.
~ Helen - 20 December 2025 (written 2023)