Jeopardy Rush

I spend a week preparing for a live event portrait job. Sketching the family as they eat, watch TV, sit patiently. Every time I take on live work, do a lecture, go somewhere new, there's part of me wondering whether I might have been happier sat in my studio without this jeopardy.

Of course not.

Not happier, safer. Dangerous comfort.

It's about balance, of course, but finding the right amount of jeopardy for you is key to maintaining creative growth. But is the right amount right? Sometimes full blown knife edge panic brings on such precious clarity, such appreciation of the peaceful baseline that we feel born again.

On the big night, I'm sketching away, half-worried about messing up the likeness of the girl who glides her phone around the table like a child's imaginary spaceship, documenting my pen, my face, the drawing event in every detail. In the end, the likeness is kind of there, if not the Mona Lisa.

Does an absence of risk do anyone's creativity any good? I'm not so sure. But maybe some folk really do need yawning canyons of comfort to ease into their optimal.

But I doubt it.