Creativity Quote by Leonard Baskin

“I always felt that I had anxiety of survival…” lands like a confession from someone who’s seen behind the curtain of success and found it flimsy. Baskin isn’t describing simple worry about paying bills; he’s naming a deeper, almost bodily insecurity that outlives the paycheck. The key phrase is “in terms of livelihood”: not income, but life-work. For an artist, livelihood is never just a salary line. It’s the ongoing permission to keep making, to keep mattering, to keep being taken seriously by patrons, galleries, institutions, and the fickle weather of taste.

The subtext is blunt: financial abundance doesn’t cancel precarity when your identity is yoked to output and reception. “Even when I was making plenty of money” exposes the myth that creative stability is a reward you unlock. Money arrives, anxiety stays, because the fear is less about shortage than about fragility. One bad season, one shift in fashion, one personal drought, and the entire structure can feel temporary. Baskin’s work, famously dense with mortality and moral weight, makes this admission feel consistent rather than surprising: survival is his theme, so of course it’s also his private metronome.

Context matters, too. Baskin came up in a 20th-century art world where reputation and market value could swing wildly, and where craft-heavy, figurative work often sat uneasily beside the era’s dominant avant-garde narratives. That tension helps explain the edge in his phrasing. He’s not romanticizing suffering; he’s documenting the ambient stress that shadows making a life out of making art.