Here’s what I’m facing today — the struggle to BEGIN.

Today I begin final artwork for a children’s book.  Blank illustration board is lying on my table taunting me.   Insecurity surfaces, as always.  Will I be able to do it again?  Do I have what it takes today?  What if the work isn’t good enough? 

The deadline is real.  A promise has been made.    Like any performer, there comes a moment when you must simply step up and deliver.    Didn’t sleep well last night?  Me either.  The deadline doesn’t care.

Here are some strategies I’ve learned for building momentum.  These are simple, but it really does help me to remind myself:

1.  I  can’t paint an entire book.  (For fine art, I can’t paint an entire show).  Not today.  What I can do today is steps.   Break the project into doable action steps.

2.  Prepare materials and the work space.  Enjoy the fact that you get to make art today.  You don’t have to shovel dirt.  This is a blessed day already.  Be grateful.

3.  Review the project.   Divide the number of images needed by the days available.  How many images do I need to complete per day?  Per week?  Set a reasonable goal for each day.

4.  Build in margin.  Expect mistakes and do-overs.   Plan on it.  Amateurs expect magic on the first try.  Experts know when to start again.

5.  Shut out all thoughts of audience response, sales, awards, accolades of any kind.  That’s NOT what this is about.   That’s not where art comes from.

6.  Play music that energizes you.

7.  Forget everything else and lose yourself in the joy of image-making.  The feel of the brush in your hand, the smell of the paints, the textures, colors, line… FIND THE FUN and get lost in it.

These are the things I’m telling myself and doing today.  Because the inertia is real.  The fear is real.

The one other thing I always do is offer the gift back to the Giver and ask for help.  No point in trying to do this alone.

Time to get in there and make some art.

Here is a list of questions I wrote on the board to begin the last session of my fall Studio Mentoring Workshop.   We had a great discussion.  It was surprisingly difficult for people to answer the first question.

1)  What are your strengths as an artist?

Think about visual language.  Are you good at color?  Value patterns?  Space division? etc.

Think about style.  Are you naturally wired to paint  Impressionism?  Realism?  Abstraction?  Minimalism?   Have you made peace with your particular bent?

Think about communication.  Can you move an audience?  Can you connect with something deeper than a pleasing surface?

Think about subject matter.   Can you paint show-stopping still lifes?  Are you good at capturing the soul behind the eyes of a portrait?  Do your landscapes sing?

Flannery O’Connor said about writers — this is a paraphrase in my words — that you can write about anything you choose, but you cannot choose what you will write about well.

SO the question is – what are you good at?  What do people tell you they like about your work?

In the workshop session, we went around the room, telling each of the twelve artists what we, as a group, believe are their strengths.

2.  What are your weaknesses as an artist?

One person said “shapes.”  Another said, “color.”  Drawing came up.  Somebody else said dividing space was a problem.  Growth becomes possible when we can identify the areas where it is needed.  You have to know what disease you have before you can treat it.

3.  What do you need to understand better?

This is different from #2.  A “weakness” in question #2 is the inability to adequately put into practice something you already understand.  You are not yet able to get it from your head to the end of your brush.

The question now is not what knowledge you can’t yet fully use, but what knowledge do you lack?  What do you just not “get?”

I remember vividly the time in my career when it was painfully obvious that I didn’t understand color.   It wasn’t that I couldn’t do what I already knew.  I didn’t know.  I wasn’t even sure what the questions should be, let alone the answers.

Another example– It took me years after reading David Leffel’s book “Oil Painting Secrets from a Master” to really understand what a visual concept is.  He introduced me to the importance of having a visual concept for each painting, and did a fine job explaining it, but I really didn’t grasp it for a long time.

4.  What do you need to DO to grow?

Do you know what to do to “move the ball forward?”  I mean things like:  what excercises can you do to work out the things you know but can’t yet control?  What books should you read to gain insight (ask friends, make a list)?  What teachers should you seek out, what workshops you should take?  What actions can you take that will get you over your current hurdles?

And if you continue doing the same things the same way you’ve always done them…well…

5.  What are the top three names on your list of masters you intend to be influenced by?

To become wise, we must choose to be influenced by the wise.  Who are your mentors in the world of master artists?  Do you know what it is about their work that moves you?  How will you absorb the lessons they have to offer?   Are library books of their work stacked next to your bed?  Are you able to explain to a non-painter in easily understandable terms what makes their work great?  Have you copied their work lately?

6.  Who are your art buddies?

Community is a creative person’s secret weapon.  Usually I find that I have been given 80% of what I need, and the other 20% of what I need has been given to someone else.  With whom are you meeting regularly?  Is there someone you call when you crash and begin to doubt whether you have any talent?  Who needs your input and encouragement as much as you need theirs?

Copy After Mary Cassatt | 35 x 25 oil on canvas

I believe in copying masters for one reason:  I want to grow.  Here’s a copy of a Mary Cassatt  painting done at the same size as the original.  (I always try to work the same size if possible because scale is part of the master’s design – it’s part of the piece).

Copying a master painting forces you to do things you would not do on your own.  You mix colors you would not normally mix, you make strokes unfamiliar to your hand.    You spend several hours concentrating on the subtleties in the image you would never have noticed otherwise.  You learn the structure of a piece.

“But real artists don’t copy.”

Have you heard that one?

Cezanne spent many hours in the Louvre copying masters.  He’d spend half the day in the museum copying, the other half painting his own work in his studio.  Picasso copied masters.   Van Gogh and Sargent copied masters.   Many of the most elite painters of all time learned by copying masters.

Looking for a way to spur your artistic growth?   Need to recharge your creative energy?  Copying may be just the boost you need right now.  Plus it’s FUN.

“Walk with the wise and become wise.” (Proverbs 13:20).

“Once you have decided what it is about your subject you wish to paint, ignore the rest of what you see.”

- Richard Schmid (from David Slonim’s notes taken at a workshop with Richard, Loveland, CO, Nov. 1997)

“I do about two temperas a year and only about twenty watercolors are good enough to let out.” 

-(Andrew Wyeth:  An Interview, The Art of Andrew Wyeth, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco,1973.)

Andrew Wyeth, "Woodchopper Study", watercolor, 1964

Thank God for Wyeth’s honesty.   He was a master not only because he painted great art, but because he was wise enough to not show the other stuff.  He edited his body of work.

I’m learning that the best way to produce a body of top-quality work is to produce a lot of work and then select the best of the bunch. Nobody needs to see the rest.  A mature artist knows that most of what he or she paints is prep work for the good stuff.

So if only 10-20% of what I produce is good enough to release to the market, that’s not a problem.    It’s part of the creative process.

Thanks for the encouragement, Mr. Wyeth.

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.  No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”

- Robert Frost

I love the moment a piece of art or a story starts breathing.   This is the payoff in the creative process for all the trying and failing, all the anxiety, the doubt, the fear, the mountain of sketches and endless revisions.   The individual parts suddenly begin talking to each other.   One area of color to another, one story event to another…What had been a cobbled-together patchwork  becomes a unified harmony.    There was a general plan, but this was not foreseen.   Weeks and months of digging — finally the gold.   The art is now telling you where it’s going, what it wants to be.    Now we’re flying. 

Magic.

Treasure is always buried.

KEEP DIGGING...