But if a work wasn’t going well, he would wander the New York City streets, often stopping in at the Cedar Bar or the Eighth Street Club in search of a friendly face.Barbara is a tall woman with a long face and strongly defined cheekbones. When Guston finished a painting, it was often in the middle of the night, and in a burst of excitement, he’d wake up his wife to ask for her opinion. “I’d find him at the kitchen table, nursing a hangover with black coffee,” she remembered in her memoir of her father (titled, appropriately, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston).

His daughter, Musa Mayer, recalls him waking up around the time that she came home from school. It was a fair reflection of the American painter’s own work habits, which typically involved working through the entire night and coming to bed only once the sun started to rise. Another motif in these later works is the character of the artist, often bathed in the harsh light of a bare bulb as he toils away in his studio. Minimal sleep and copious alcohol consumption eventually took its toll: Toulouse-Lautrec died young, at age 36, likely of syphilis and alcoholism.Īlthough Philip Guston first came to prominence as an Abstract Expressionist, his abrupt shift to figuration-featuring hooded Klu Klux Klansmen, rendered in a cartoonish style-eventually defined his legacy. And even after a long night of drawing and drinking, he still woke early to print lithographs. He was also very fond of alcohol, drinking more or less continuously each day (he was particularly obsessed with American cocktails, even inventing his own, “The Earthquake,” which was half absinthe, half cognac). To capture the acrobats, singers, and prostitutes who populated this gritty world, Toulouse-Lautrec spent most nights at brothels or cabarets with a sketchpad in hand or a canvas propped up on an easel. He went on to make a number of artistically groundbreaking (and commercially successful) lithographs for the Moulin Rouge and other similar establishments, as well as frank and empathetic depictions of Parisian nightlife. Some 3,000 copies were hung around the city in late 1891 almost immediately, intrigued Parisians began to flock to the cabaret. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s first poster for the Moulin Rouge made him an overnight sensation. But each of these artists found that night time was ripe for productivity, creativity, and artmaking. Not all of them were by choice-some, like Louise Bourgeois and Lee Krasner were dealing with insomnia. Knowing this, it comes as little surprise to learn that there were a host of famous artists who worked into the wee hours of the night. These distractions help to trigger the “aha” moments necessary to move forward on creative or innovative projects. We’re better at solving insight problems during non-peak hours, when our brain is less focused and more prone to distraction. Insight problems, on the other hand, often try to trick the solver and require out-of-the-box thinking. Analytic problems require more systematic solutions, repeating the same process again and again until you get the right answer (think algebra).

Generally, while working, we’re dealing with two distinct types of problems: analytic and insight. For owls, peak productivity can hit in the evening, rather than during the typical 9-to-5 workday.Īnd, as some research has shown, it might actually boost creativity to work when we’re tired. These temporal preferences might be due to a delayed circadian rhythm, the internal clock that controls melatonin levels, body temperature, and sleep drive. Some people are “larks,” working better in the morning others are “owls,” who thrive at night. But it’s by no means a universal path to creative success. For certain artists- Georgia O’Keeffe and Joan Miró among them-waking up early was a key part of their daily routine. That’s not to say that he completely missed the mark. But his declaration that “it is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom” may not have aged quite as well. After more than 2,000 years, many of the Greek philosopher’s contributions to logic and biology are still sound. Aristotle was right about a lot of things.

Cash pop night owl