Time & Perspective Quote by Richard MacDonald

MacDonald’s flex isn’t about volume; it’s about refusing the tidy logic of the market. “30 to 40 pieces going on” reads like overkill until you hear the subtext: a serious studio practice doesn’t move in a straight line. It sprawls. It doubles back. It keeps multiple bets alive at once because the point isn’t efficiency, it’s discovery. By stacking projects, he’s building a creative buffer against the one thing that can quietly ruin an artist’s judgment: the pressure to make the next saleable object.

The line “this is not economically driven at all” is doing more than swatting away a stereotype. In contemporary art, productivity is often interpreted as commerce in disguise, a factory line dressed up as inspiration. MacDonald flips that suspicion. The abundance isn’t a hustle; it’s evidence of process, of iteration, of an artist letting ideas ripen on different timelines. One sculpture might be waiting on a technical solution, another on an emotional one. Working in parallel keeps the studio from becoming a single-track referendum on whether one piece is “working.”

Context matters, too: sculpture is expensive, slow, and physically demanding. Materials, molds, foundry schedules, revisions, and sheer gravity conspire against quick turnaround. Saying it’s not economically driven signals privilege, yes, but also a kind of artistic militancy: he’s staking his identity on craft and momentum rather than a clean inventory cycle. The real message is autonomy. He’s telling you the studio is a laboratory, not a storefront.