How I Live: William T. Carson on Process, Patience, and Letting Materials Lead
The New Mexico-based artist has built a creative life around natural materials. Here's what he's learned along the way.
Welcome to How I Live, an interview series featuring entrepreneurs, artists, and tastemakers building careers around what they love.
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WILLIAM T. CARSON spent his childhood on a cattle ranch in Montana surrounded by coal mines. He didn’t know it then, but decades later that combustible rock beneath his boots would become a defining material of his artistic career.
William’s foray into the arts began when he went on to study architecture and various art mediums at Colorado College, where he earned a degree with Distinction in Art Studio. He also spent a period of time at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad in Copenhagen, where he drew inspiration from minimalist principles and Danish modernism that he’d eventually bring into his own work.
From 2019 to 2026, he served as Program Manager & Assistant Curator at the Holt/Smithson Foundation, and in 2025 was an artist in residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Right now, William is at his family’s ranch in rural Montana, crafting artwork for an upcoming solo exhibition at the Nüart Gallery in Los Angeles, opening September 12th.
A Brand New Interview Series to Help You Achieve Your Dreams
William has been honing and refining his craft for years, creating paintings, sculptures, sound performances, and time-based installations in his own unique vision.
This spring, I discovered William’s work “Split Earth” via his Instagram. It’s a mural of fossilized carbon, broken up into pieces and repositioned across a massive wooden panel. His caption for the piece came from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, one of my favorite books of all-time.
As I became more familiar with William’s art, I knew he’d be the perfect fit as the first interview for How I Live, a new series of conversations with entrepreneurs, artists, and tastemakers who share how they got to where they are now, and what they’ve learned along the way.
The aim of this series is to give tangible advice and inspiration for you to go and pursue your passions. To give you a boost of courage to go left when everybody else is going right. That’s the Live a Little way, after all.
Without further ado, my conversation with William T. Carson.
How I Live: William T. Carson
What led you to the kind of work you’re doing?
When I was growing up, making art was always the thing I could focus on for hours on end, and it’s the same way now. In those moments where I’m deep in creation mode I find my incessant churn of thoughts dissolves away and I feel part of something larger.
That feeling, that flow state, and that sense of connection to a higher power is at the core of why I am an artist.
What does the creative process look like for you?
My process always starts with materials. It begins by spending time observing and experimenting with a material to see what it does and doesn’t like to do. I think of this process as a conversation.
During this experimentation phase I am seeking a way to quietly transform the material through a minimal intervention that allows the material to transcend its identity and expected form. Once I develop that language for working with a material, I then create drawings to envision scaling up the idea and developing works for exhibition.
How do you view your career path, and where do you see yourself now?
I see the path of being an artist a bit like going on a long sea kayaking expedition (which I love to do): much of the time you’re quietly paddling along the shoreline alone with the rhythm of your thoughts, and other times you find yourself in the middle of a massive open water crossing and you’re terrified.
So, you raft up with your buddies for help, and sometimes you’re exploring a cove when a humpback whale breaches beside you and you can’t believe how lucky you are.
I’m currently in one of those “going for it full time” leaps right now. There’s an intensity and excitement about it, but I’ve been working on expanding my definition of success to include working for others, because I’ve learned a tremendous amount from working at arts nonprofits and with other artists.
What’s a non-negotiable in your daily routine?
First thing upon waking up, I go through a series of stretches to limber up and then head to our little meditation room, which is this funky dome at the top of our house in the mountains outside of Santa Fe.
After my morning meditation, I brew myself a perfect cup of pour over coffee—I swear by Tetsu Kasuya’s 4:6 Method (which won him the 2016 World Brewers Cup!).
Then, I write my Morning Pages and let all my monkey-brain thoughts come pouring out. As an artist and someone who loves handwriting, I’m pretty particular about pen and paper. My daily driver notebook is a Midori A5 notebook from Japan with the goatskin leather cover and my pen is a Kaweco Special brass fountain pen with a medium nib.
Tell me about a movie, book, or song that’s changed your perspective on life.
Back in January of 2022 I had the flu and while I was holed up sick I read George Saunder’s book Tenth of December, which was the first time I read his writing.
Saunder’s ability to transmit the inner voice in each character in those stories made me feel such a wide range of conflicting emotions—simultaneously hilarious and devastating and poignant. The various voices in that book made me think about how much of our reality is shaped by our inner dialogue.
Reading Tenth of December made me fall back in love with reading in a big way that I hadn’t felt since I was kid, when I would read my fresh copy of the newest Magic Treehouse out loud to my mom on the drive home from the bookstore, and now reading fiction has become an essential part of my life.
In your free time outside of work, people will say you’re…
Probably out camping with my sweetheart Chloe and our Great Pyrenees, Mara, cooking up a storm over a campfire in the backcountry.
We love to find a remote spot out here in New Mexico, set up camp, and just exist out in the beauty for as long as we can. I’m a big fan of unplugging from the noise and spending time in the wilderness.
What do you hope people feel or take away when they encounter your work?
I hope people get to experience a bit of beauty, mystery, and awe when they view my work. I’m interested in the preconceptions we hold when we encounter materials—the way that coal might be thought of as a resource rather than an object of contemplation, and I use beauty to try and slice through these layers of preconceptions so that someone might have a novel experience with a material. I think when we loosen up our preconceptions, we open up room for new ideas.
I want my work to be generous in spirit and open to interpretation so that people feel comfortable sharing their own true reaction to it.
What’s one piece of advice you’d leave for someone looking to align their career with their passions?
Momentum is the most essential ingredient. For instance, right now I’m committed to making a drawing each day no matter what. It doesn’t matter if the drawing isn’t great, it’s at least one moment in the day where I am proving to myself that I am an artist.
I think little moments that build momentum and your sense of self-identity are essential when you’re trying to align what you’re passionate about with your career. I like to think of it like erosion—small actions accumulating over time to form something remarkable.
I’m a fan of the ideas that James Clear writes about in Atomic Habits. The essential idea that resonated with me is his insistence on creating habits and focusing on process rather than setting goals; chasing goals creates the delusion that we will finally feel accomplished once we arrive at some destination, but I’m continually relearning that the meaning lies with the process rather than the attainment.
Live a Little
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