What did you actually do today?

“Why is art important in society?”

I was asked this question during an interview for Art Squat magazine. It wasn’t: is art important? But why it is. An unquestionable assumption that art matters. I loved that certainty.

My first attempt at answering spilled over two full pages. But underneath all the arguments, distilled to an essence and polished to fit the form, there was something deeper stirring.

Why do I feel like I need to defend it?

It stayed with me because it touched a part of me that questions sometimes, quietly, whether what I’m doing is important and matters.

Is the doubt personal or structural?

I come from a long line of farmers. People who understand work in planted crops and harvested fields. Work that leaves your muscles sore and your back covered in sweat. In my family, the value of work was never abstract. You could count it, measure it. It meant something you could point to at the end of the day: a field planted, a fence repaired, animals fed, eggs collected. It had a purpose and a profit that comes from it.

My work often looks like a pile of discarded sketches, chaotic drafts, and a mind that refuses to settle even at night.

I respect the work I was raised around, and that understanding still stays with me.

And sometimes, when I sit in front of an easel, shaping ideas and pushing paint instead of soil, I feel that old measuring instinct appears.

Where are the calluses?

Where is the proof?

Where is the visible result of a day’s work?

Did I contribute?

There are days, sometimes weeks, when I have nothing I can point to. The only evidence is a stack of loose papers filled with half-formed sketches and fragments of thoughts, searching, circling around something I can’t even name yet.

And then there is the voice in the back of my head. The voice of my great grandmother and the generations before her:

“What did you actually do today?”

For a long time, I tried to answer that question by defending what I do. By comparing art to other professions. Elevating it even above and calling upon the spirit and soul of humanity. Searching for arguments strong enough to justify my place. Desperately trying to show the value and enormous amount of work, discipline and patience it takes.

It was almost as if preparing for a debate I had too many times with people who perceive doing art just as a hobby, done at times of leisure.

Maybe the question isn’t whether art is “real work” or whether it matters. Maybe the problem is how we have learned to define work at all and how our modern society perceives value.

Somewhere along the way we decided that only what can be measured counts.

In the world I grew up in, work left visible marks. Dirt under your nails, muscles aching at the end of the day.

But not all cultivation looks the same.

Farmers cultivate soil. Artists cultivate perception.

Farmers prepare the ground for seeds. Artists prepare the inner ground for meaning.

Both require patience. Both require trust in what cannot yet be seen. Both demand showing up day after day, even when there is no harvest to display.

I could tell you that art matters. That we need your art now more than ever. That if you are an aspiring artist, you should follow your dreams and never give up. Those are beautiful words, and I believe them. But on their own they burn fast. I’m looking for something steadier. A small flame within you can always return to. Something that does not depend on applause, validation or visible proof to keep burning.

/If you spent today thinking, sketching, rewriting, discarding, searching, redesigning, reinventing over and over… you were tending something.

It may not leave calluses. It may not fill a barn. It may not impress anyone scrolling past it.

But it shapes the way you see. And the way you see shapes how you speak, how you respond, how you treat the people around you. It shapes the stories we tell and the spaces we create for each other.

When that old voice asks: “What did you actually do today?”

My answer is quieter now. I prepared the ground.

And yet, I still wonder why so many of us feel the need to defend that preparation. Why artists so often speak as if standing in a courtroom?

Who taught us that what cannot be weighed, measured or immediately profited from must be justified?

I feel I’m only scratching the surface and I’d like to dive deeper and look closer at all those questions. There will be more thoughts coming on this topic. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear yours.

Marta