Pip: What does it take to keep making art when the world hasn’t noticed yet — and may never? That’s the question sitting at the center of Artistry by Mikel this week.

Mara: H. Mikel Feilen writes about the interior life of the working artist — the compulsion, the cost, and what persistence actually looks like across a lifetime. Let’s start with the artist who hasn’t been discovered yet.

The Artist Unknown

Pip: This segment is about what drives people to keep creating when recognition is nowhere in sight — the internal logic of the artist, and whether external validation even enters the equation.

Mara: The post sets it up plainly: “People who are artists are not creative because they want to be. No, they are creative because they have to be.”

Pip: That distinction matters more than it might sound. Want implies choice, something you could set down. Have to is closer to physiology — it’s not ambition, it’s wiring.

Mara: And the post lives that out directly. There’s a passage about dancing and teaching dance for free, about writing and drawing and painting all fueling a reason to get out of bed at seventy. The artistry isn’t contingent on payment.

Pip: Which makes the economic section of the post land harder. Because the post is also honest, most artists have waited tables, tended bar, or done something they didn’t care about just to keep the lights on.

Mara: Right — and the framing there is careful. It’s not presented as failure. The phrase quoted from his father is: “You do what you gotta do to pay the bills.” Practical, not bitter.

Pip: Followed immediately by the other half of the father’s advice, which is the one that actually stuck.

Mara: His father Marvin was a self-taught mathematician who ended up as a senior nuclear cost engineer — no high school diploma — and the post calls that “the essence of the arts: persistence steeped in learning and passion.” Math as artistry. It reframes the whole category.

Pip: It also quietly dismantles the idea that art lives only in studios and concert halls. Acrobatic comedy in Las Vegas for two years counts. A quart of beer and a physics book at the kitchen table counts.

Mara: The post closes on the recognition problem directly — that for every famous artist, thousands of equally skilled ones go undiscovered, some permanently. The internet helps, but it also floods the field with more voices competing for the same attention.

Pip: So the advice at the end isn’t about cracking the algorithm. It’s simpler: stay motivated by learning, share your imagination wherever you can, and don’t let other people’s opinions reshape what you think of your own work.

Mara: The vulnerability is the point — showing the work knowing it might not land, and doing it anyway.

Pip: That’s the only version of the story where the unknown artist keeps going.

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Mara: What stays with me is the insistence that compulsion and craft are the same thing — you don’t choose it, you just keep showing up.

Pip: Unknown or not. Next time, more from the world Mikel’s building here.