Creativity Quote by William Merritt Chase

Restlessness is the hidden engine in Chase's line: a painter who knew that even a long life in the studio is still a cramped canvas. "Life is very short" sounds like the standard memento mori, but he immediately swerves away from moralizing into appetite. He doesn't want fewer distractions, or a simpler program. He wants four lifetimes to keep chasing the same things. The ache here isn't regret; it's scale.

That twist matters because it reframes ambition as devotion rather than careerism. Chase isn't fantasizing about alternate selves, he is doubling down on a single, inexhaustible pursuit - looking harder, painting more, testing light, surfaces, rooms, people. The subtext is that art isn't a project you finish; it's a practice that keeps widening as your eye gets better. Mastery doesn't close the loop. It raises the stakes.

Context sharpens it. Chase was a Gilded Age American artist who moved between Old World training and a rapidly modernizing art market, between society portraiture and teaching, between the promise of impressionistic freshness and the demands of patrons. In that churn, "the things I am seeking now to do" reads like a defense of curiosity against both time and commerce. He's insisting that the work worth doing is work you can't exhaust, only deepen.

It's also a quietly bracing definition of a life: not the pursuit of balance, but the acceptance of endless wanting as a sign you're alive and paying attention.