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Gandhi sketch by Ben Shahn
I know that since the Academy, we have all had moments where we feel like we just can't be the artists we want to be without the living-and-breathing art mentality we had over the summer. It seems like living a regular old life won't make you an artist. While reading "The Shape of Content," by Ben Shahn (see it over in the books link), I ran across this refreshing passage and thought I would share:

"...art has its roots in real life. Art may affirm its life-giving soil or repudiate it wholly. It may mock as bitterly as did Goya, be partisan, as was Daumier, discover beauty within the sordid and real as did Toulouse-Lautrec. Art may luxuriate in life positively and affirmatively with Renoir, or Matisse, or Rubens, or Vermeer. It may turn to the nebulous horizons of sense-experience with the Post-Impressionists, the Cubists, the various order of Abstractionist, but in any case it is life itself as it chances to exist that furnishes the stimulus for art... Any living situation in which an artist finds material pertinent to his own temper is a proper situation for art... Thus it is not unimaginable that art arises from something stronger than stimulation or even inspiration - that it may take fire from something closer to provocation, that it may not just turn to life, but that it may at certain times be compelled by life."

So keep living and arting, my friends :)