Is That All There Is?
A dear artist friend of mine recently finished a major commission. (SO excited for her and proud of her!) However, she mentioned she’s feeling a little let down after all the hard work she put in to get it finished on a tight deadline. She’s left with that feeling: Is that it?
It reminded me of a story I heard about an artist who achieved the distinction and recognition of being included in the Whitney biennial in her early 20s- an achievement that many contemporary American artists covet and aspire to. And yet, as she was riding the bus after the opening and she described an empty feeling and a similar thought. So that was it?
(Depending on where you are right now with your career you may be saying to yourself, If only I had such problems!)
But this kind of post-event let down brings up a question all of us face: Why are we doing this stuff in the first place? Because I’m sure many of you, like me, have these benchmarks – things we want to achieve because we think we’ll feel better when we get them.
I’ll be really happy when…
I get in that gallery.
Someone buys my work.
I get in the Whitney Biennial.
We might get so caught up in reaching that goal, completing a body of work or preparing for an exhibition that we forgot to feel happy with where we are right here and now. We may neglect to appreciate the present moment and our current situation.
I know in my own life I have had different dreams for my art. For instance, when I was in my 20s I always wanted to travel abroad for my art and have shows in different countries. I dreamed of exhibiting my work in museums. Now that I’ve achieved these things I want even bigger things. I want to be in bigger museums and better known venues. I compare myself to others who have achieved things I have not and I forget to appreciate all that I have created and all that I have achieved. This isn’t good enough. What’s next?
There are always things to appreciate no matter where you are in your career. It’s great to always be looking forward and to have big dreams visions and goals to help us move forward.
But actually the true joy and excitement is in the day-to-day!
We live only in the present moment.
Honestly, nothing else exists. Everything else is just dreams (the future) or memories (the past).
We got in this racket to enjoy the creative ride!
Every dream or goal is to inspire some kind of fun action that we can savor while we are in the moment.
Moment by moment by moment.
Contrary to popular myth it’s not about some kind of arrival, some pinnacle, some accomplishment.
Think for a moment about all the unfulfilled dreams and wishes you have currently for your creative or professional life. Now ponder what exactly is it that you hope you will feel when you’ve achieved this dream? Will you feel more successful? Will you feel happier because you’ll feel validated as an artist? Will you feel better when your work is recognized? Or that other people will take you more seriously as an artist?
Is there a way you can validate yourself right now? How can you appreciate or recognize yourself as you are in your current s
tate?
Now, pause to savor this very moment. Breathe deeply. Feel your body against the chair, hear the hum of your computer. Receive the sounds around you near and far. The drip of the faucet, a bird, the neighbor’s thumping bass? Notice the colors and textures in your vicinity. Close your eyes and allow a faint smile to lighten your lips. Can you keep breathing and relaxing until you can touch on the exquisiteness and the preciousness of this present moment?
I’d love it if you’d share in the comments below something small (or big!) that you treasure and cherish in your current life. Be it the fact that you are blessed to have a box full of art supplies to make your work, or the fact that you have a space to work in or the fact that you have these gifts or skills or you have a family member or a friend or a teacher who is supportive of your endeavors.
Isn’t it wonderful that I have this connection to my creativity?
How great it is that I have had ideas and new ones keep flowing through me!
Isn’t it sweet that I am reading this article because I’m committed to supporting myself mentally, emotionally spiritually as a creative person?
Whatever it is, I invite you to appreciate that now and do not let go of your dreams!
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Remember How Much Fun Paint Can Be?
Do you remember the first time you painted? The pure joy of smushing paint about? The miracle of watching colors interact? The visceral thrill of seeing just what the stuff would do?
Sometimes, as we gain skills and get more “serious” about art, it’s easy to get caught up in outcomes and we forget just how fun paint can be as a material. But don’t you find that playfulness is often where you best “serious” discoveries occur?
Pouring with acrylics can take just about anyone back to that immediate delight of handling pure color. Here is a video to show you a basic technique with pouring :
But you ought to know there is SO MUCH more it can do! For instance, have you seen Brazilian painter Beatriz Milhazes’ exuberant canvas collaged with layers of acrylic sheets in eyepopping colors and forms?
I created this piece using pouring medium and string gel combined. See my post here for video with details on how I did it.
Here is list of materials that I used that will help you get started:
Happy Painting!
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What Is the Ideal Day for an Artist?
What would your ideal day look like? Have you ever stopped to think about it in all its juicy details? How would you move through your day? How much time would you spend making art? Who would you like to be around? How would you feel?
The artists in the Mindful Artist Mentorship Program were asked to do just that and one of the artists came up with such a deliciously vivid picture of her daily life, I wanted to share it with you.
You see, if any area of your life isn’t quite satisfactory to you, focusing on the dissatisfaction only mires you further in what you don’t want. You keep thinking about it talking about it and feeling it over and over.
I know! I do it, too. It actually can take a great amount of effort to shift our thoughts from their well-worn paths and I applaud anyone who makes even the slightest effort to shift their thinking patterns. Consider the benefits: better mood, lowered blood pressure, greater peace of mind, clearer thinking.
Just for a minute – recall any delightful moment with a loved one (human or animal). How do you feel just thinking about it? What happens to your mind, emotions and body as you savor the details?
Creating a clear picture of where you would like to be and allowing yourself to daydream a bit, straying from reality a little or a lot, points your boat (your conscious attention) in the direction you want to head.
Also, using your imagination in this way, even when you aren’t able to work on your creative projects, exercises those creative muscles and keeps them in shape.
Besides, it just feels good!
Here’s one artist’s “Ideal Scene.” I encourage you to take 15 minutes tonight before bed and write yours out, too.
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| By Simon Davison (originally posted to Flickr as IMG_6045) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
I get up early and have coffee and a donut…(it’s MY perfect day, not my doctor’s). My daughter in LA calls. We have named her the Breakfast Fairy because she calls early before both of us start our day. She is a loving child/woman. She fills me with the same kind of happiness that painting does.
I do my crossword, knowing the paints are calling. Maybe I cruise through the garden to see what is either in bloom or ripe for picking.
After setting up a still life and roughing in the outline of a new painting, I call a girl friend and she picks up the lunch boxes I ordered at a local restaurant. When she arrives, we picnic out in the orchard and chat. Cold frittata stacked high with artichokes, yellow bell peppers, spinach and mushrooms is followed by fresh strawberry tarts, baklava and iced tea. We talk about the scenery, the day, our husbands and kids…just gently going over the details of our lives.
My friend leaves just before I go back to painting. I turn on music and time goes away.
The day is fading and I start to think about dinner as I clean my brushes. My husband, is nosing around the extra frittata I bought and we decide to heat it up and make a salad from the fresh tomatoes in the garden. While I am slicing them, I think how beautiful they would be in a painting, the translucent meat and juice flowing onto the cutting board…
The peaches are ripe and peel easily. A perfect dessert with ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery. We watch the Daily Show and laugh at Jon Stewart’s jokes.
Then my husband heads for bed and I go back into my studio. The painting is calling me.
“Come work with me,” it whispers, “Make me rise from the canvas. Give me life.”
There is my calling. It is literally calling to me. “Give me life, let me breathe, let me be seen.”
It’s midnight when I crawl into bed. The painting is sitting on a music stand I keep in my bedroom. It will be there in the morning when I wake up. It’s a newborn, and I am tired from giving birth. We both need to sleep now.
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How to Pack Art Supplies for Summer Travel
| Many artists want to get away for a vacation but rarely do they want to leave their art practice behind. In fact, if you are going away for more than a week you will probably sorely miss creating if you don’t pack some art supplies.
When I get relaxed and I have oodles of free time one of the first things I want to do it seems is draw. So, how to make your painting studio portable? If you are driving, you can often find room for canvases, a French easel (portable paint box with easel legs) and all your paints and brushes. Here is our man Cézanne modeling the portability of the French easel:
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However, if you are flying, biking or backpacking, you’ll need to pare things down to what you can fit easily in suitcase, panniers or pack. Drawing supplies are pretty easy to pack – pastels, pencils, charcoal and paper can all tuck neatly into a suitcase. But what if you long to paint large on your trip to Italy or the Ozarks? One option is to bring smaller pieces of paper and put them together to form one larger piece. Such as this piece by David Hockney, made up of 4 smaller sheets. |
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| If you work in acrylic or oil on paper, you can gesso some heavy sheets of paper such as Coventry rag which is 100% cotton. When you get home you can mount any paper onto canvas, linen or wood panel so it has more presence and durability.
If you are traveling domestically, you might consider shipping your art supplies via ground transport to your destination so you don’t have to worry about packing them or flying with liquids. If you are traveling abroad, shipping art supplies to or from a foreign country can be a slow and costly option, and I don’t recommend it if you can avoid it. Instead, try paring down your materials to the bare minimum that you can easily fit into your suitcase. Drawing media and watercolors are the most portable. You can also make your own set by packing a few tubes of paint in zip-lock bag and wrapping your brushes in a sheet of thin cardboard to protect the bristles from bending. Sometimes I will improvise a palette on the spot. A plastic lid from a food container or those waxed paper caps they put on the water glasses in some hotel rooms work beautifully in a pinch. Not packing a palette means I can travel lighter. I like the Arches watercolor blocks. Because the paper |
I also like the Rotring Art Pens in Fine and Extra Fine for pen and ink sketching. They eliminate the need for a messy bottle of ink by packaging the ink in neat cartridges.  The ink is a rich, archival black. I’ve been known to dip the nip in water to create shades of grey or to use my finger or a brush to pull ink off of the tip and make washes. |
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Brush pens are also fun and easy to pack. Faber-Castell makes 48 gorgeous colors that are all lightfast. The brush nib makes wide strokes and also very fine lines. No palette, no brushes needed! |
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Charcoals and chalk pastels travel nicely but you will need to use a fixative to protect your drawings from smudging. Fixative comes is in an aerosol and takes up a lot of suitcase space. (You are also not allowed to fly with aerosols according to TSA regulations.) If you like colored pencils, Caran d’ache watercolor pencils or pastels or graphite pencils they may be easier option to travel with because they smear less they don’t require fixative. |
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| If you are going abroad, I recommend packing what you need. I love to shop for art supplies in other countries. Just looking at the different brands, the ways items are arranged and displayed fascinates me. But I would rather travel with my own supplies because then I know I have what I need and I can get started right away and don’t have to spend an afternoon hunting down a shop on some obscure little street.
Later, I can go on a shopping trip to supplement what I brought or just for the pure enjoyment of browsing. Remember, though, that you may not carry any oil paints, solvents or mediums on an airplane as they are flammable and considered hazardous. If you are an oil painter, you may carry oil bars on an airplane instead of tubes of paint. They look more like giant oil pastels and build up color easily. Pack some gessoed paper, or primed canvas or masonite panels and a few brushes and you can accomplish quite a bit. If you need to, you can purchase some solvents or mediums at your destination to clean your brushes, help manipulate the color further and to create glazes and details. (You can also clean oil brushes with non-toxic vegetable oil followed by washing in warm, soapy water.) |
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| For the acrylic painter, another solution for travel is to carry a palette of two-ounce. jars of soft body paint or fluid acrylic colors. Be sure to tape the lids closed and to seal them in Ziploc bags as the pressure on an airplane may cause them explode and spill a little paint.
Or stack them in a cylindrical mailing tube into which you can tuck a few paintbrushes to protect the bristles. You don’t have to bring a lot of colors. I suggest a primary palette of phthalocyanine blue, quinacridone crimson and yellow medium azo plus titanium white. From these I can mix beautiful rich browns, greens, oranges, and even a rich deep black! I made a youtube video here on mixing browns from those three primaries: |
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Painter Derek Leka glues seven small screwtop jars to his palette and fills them with acrylic paint for traveling. The key is to make whatever you do fun, easy to carry and easily portable. And don’t berate yourself if you don’t end up making a bunch of work but instead are distracted by the gentle summer breezes, the night sky, And besides, there is no better way to fill your artistic well than to truly relax and be in the present moment.
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The Importance of Creating Community
Making art is by nature an isolating activity. The majority of artists work alone and need quiet time in the studio to focus and concentrate, to allow ideas to bubble up, to experiment freely without prying or inquiring eyes. When I go to my studio, I like to close the door, turn off the phone, shut out the world and enter a deep, almost meditative state of concentration.
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Which means I spend many hours of my day completely alone.
Although the creative work itself may necessitate alone time and privacy, the life of an artist needn’t be lived in isolation. In fact, our success depends on the connections we cultivate. I’m not simply referring to “meeting the right people” – the influential ones who can give us something, or move our work forward. My daily life is made full by my rich community of artist friends.
Wherever you go or decide to live, cultivating a community of like-minded individuals will nourish your work. Unlike others, your artist friends will not be insulted when you choose to go to your studio on a Friday night instead of joining them at the movies.
When you are going through of periods of scant or no recognition, having no shows on the horizon, no grants to sustain you, no gallery to promote you, who will remind you how much it matters to keep doing the work?
I am fortunate to be married to a musician with a very down-to–earth philosophy on being an artist. If ever I begin to feel down-and-out, sorry for myself, or under-appreciated, he looks me in they eye and says “You are doing it for yourself, right?” and then I feel more on track. While I am not exactly doing it for myself (I sincerely want other people to benefit from my work), he reminds me that I am not in it for fame or acclaim.
Who will understand why you are devoting a large portion of your income to studio rent? Or to some ambitious five-year project? Lots of people will not relate to your lifestyle, nor will they understand it.
When the outside world seems indifferent to your creative output, your artist friends will remind you to keep at it. They won’t necessarily do this by saying so, but you will observe them making their own work, devoting their time and energy to it, and this will buoy you onward.
This is why I place such a strong emphasis on the community aspect of the Mindful Artist Mentorship Program. I love the forum, not only because it is a place where all the artists post pictures their own work, but because, it is amazing what happens when you bring a group of like-minded artists together. It is a chance to share ideas, ask questions, get support and help each other move forward in meaningful ways.
Just knowing you have friends you can call on who have committed themselves to a similar path will bring you comfort and sustenance.
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Are you giving up too early on your creative ideas?
Have you ever been in your studio and had any of the following thoughts
This is a terrible idea. What was I thinking?
I should just give up. Why am I wasting my time?
Who am I kidding? I’m not an artist.
How on earth am I going to solve this one? It’s a wreck.
This work is making me hungry. (Strange, because I just ate lunch.) I’d better go fix myself a little snack.
All people involved in creative endeavors have these thoughts. What I’ve noticed is that experienced artists, musicians, writers, etc. don’t give up at this stage.
We know it’s just a stage.
I recently started a new piece that builds on several ideas and methods that I have been working with for the past five years. I hate what it looks like right now. Yuck. As I stepped back from it, I thought to myself, “It’s a good idea, but I haven’t worked it out yet.”
When a piece of creative work begins, there’s a honeymoon period. Life is good, the creativity is flowing. We are FULL of excitement. We are literally in love with what we are working on.
As it progresses, the creative process runs through other stages and just as in any relationship, it’s normal to experience challenges. Perhaps, we can’t quite get a handle on the medium, or what looked great the day before seems awful now. You can’t quite get the ideas rolling around in your head into any satisfying form. Your studio floods, your equipment fails, your collaborator flakes, an essential material isn’t behaving the way it usually does, it starts raining, the light changes. (Feel free to add to this list!) There are an infinite number of things that can go wrong.
Believe it or not, this is a normal part of the creative process! In fact, what I’ve learned over the years is that it’s a sign that a breakthrough is about to happen. But in order to access this new level of creativity, we must keep committed to task at hand.
Too often, beginners or artists who aren’t sure of themselves, and give up too soon on an idea. They listen to that negative voice and drop the project before it has had a chance to fully blossom.
It is through giving ideas our precious time and attention that they evolve.
 Michele Theberge ©2006 gouache and flashe on paper |
Inspiration rarely zings an idea fully formed into your brain with a downloadable set of step-by-step directions. Where’s the fun in THAT?
There are few feelings more exhilarating than moving through a stuck place or solving a creative problem.
This applies to nearly ANYTHING you are working on in your life. A relationship, a new job, a meal, a home improvement project, a business. If you give up too soon you’ll never get to see that potential the idea was hinting at when it sparked that first flame of excitement.
Is there an artwork (or anything else) in your life right now that you may have given up too soon on?
Would you be willing to give it a second chance? Can you step back from it and recognize it’s potential and say to yourself:
“It’s a good idea, I just haven’t worked it out yet.”
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