News — Process

Image note: A piece from before the ball formation.

I had an incredible art day yesterday with my Mom, watercolorist Lynn Powers. We spent the day completely immersed in art. We browsed design stores, looked through the entire Modern Art wing of the Portland Art Museum (brought there by the Lucian Freud triptych), shopped materials at Dick Blick and then traveled back to my east side apartment to look at vector work I’m doing for her and discussed my current work. In between each of these things we were mostly talking art. Where we are. Where we want to go. What challenges we are facing. How we are going to overcome them.

The entire day was perfect, but it left me feeling heavy. Not sad but weighted. And weighted is a hard way to paint.

Image note: Today's unfinished frustrations. (Also Google+.)

This blog isn’t just about learning to create art. It is also about learning to create a life that is set up to create art. And in that vein, I’m on day one of a week long experiment. If my goal is to paint every day and exercise every day (because again, the latter helps the former) then I have to do it right when I get up. That is the only way I can guarantee it will happen.

I’m best in mornings. That however is not to say that I am a morning person. I am only a morning person if I have gotten 9 hours of sleep before that morning starts. And because I do a lot of work from home, there is no external force saying I have to be at a desk by 8:30AM, which means when I wake up at 10, I start the day overwhelmed by the pull of paid work and paid deadlines. My promises of art and exercise later rarely come to fruition.

So for me, it all starts the night before. I have to go to bed early enough that I get enough sleep so that I wake up early enough so that I actually exercise and work in my studio first thing.

Image note: In progress from this week's studio time.

This article popped up on my, and everyone else's,  Facebook feed, yesterday. It’s a call for us to stop setting goals but to instead focus on creating the lifestyle that will help us reach those goals. For example, instead of saying, “My goal is to learn to paint,” I would say, “I want to paint everyday.”

This falls in line a bit with how I already wanted to approach goals this year.  I’m calling them goals as shorthand for whatever falls under that big umbrella.

This year my goals surround a bigger mission of living a life that supports creativity. However that is a post for another day, but for now:

Brain to self: I like this painting. Now panic.

For me, and I imagine many other people learning to paint, there is an outer struggle and then there is the inner struggle. The outer struggle is how to draw the curve of the nose or how much medium you need to add to paint so that it has intensity but doesn’t obliterate all things underneath.

(Official 2014 Resolutions come later.)

I need a fake clock somewhere on my blog where I can keep track of how many hours I spend drawing or painting. Today I would have logged 4-5.

A few things I learned right off the bat:

I should draw between drying layers. It helps distract me for a moment, and it gets me drawing.