Continuing to share my journey of discovery with watercolor, today’s post is meant to encourage you to find ways to advance your creative practice and for me to appreciate what I’ve accomplished.
As a creative, I know about the traps, obstacles or blocks from both inside and out that can make it challenging to follow through. They still litter my path. I’ve talked before about how it’s been difficult to get motivated and stick with finishing a piece of art. I haven’t encountered that often with my textile creations or when under contract to get a job done; but when it comes to putting something to paper via drawing or painting to feed my soul, everything else seems to take priority. The first thing I needed to do was to dedicate time to allow myself to paint.
As dr. e says, “Protect your time; . . . I know a fierce painter here in the Rockies who hangs this sign on the chain that closes off the road to her house when she is in a painting or thinking mode: ‘I am working today and am not receiving visitors. I know you think this doesn’t mean you because you are my banker, agent or best friend. But it does.’
“Another sculptor I know hangs this sign on her gate: ‘Do not disturb unless I’ve won the lottery or Jesus has been sighted on the Old Taos Highway.'”
Since I’ve worked from home for over a decade, the distractions here aren’t as hard to ignore as the obligation I feel towards my clients to make myself available. This required establishing a mental boundary. A few years ago, I turned off the alerts on my phone and continue to generously use the do not disturb feature. The true test is not checking it during or before painting, remaining present to the process.
When the pandemic cancelled the class I intended to take this month, I set aside the time that would have been spent there. During the first session, I nearly completed the Flagstaff Beetle. After the initial sequestered 3 hours, I checked the phone and learned no one had any urgent requests for my time, gifting me with the luxury of painting the rest of the day.
Finishing that painting over the following weekend, I added a quickie California poppy on a Zentangle® tile. And then I was stuck. What to paint next? Should I move onto the larger sized paper? I’d been working on 5″ x 7″ canvases and the 12″ x 17″ block of Arches paper bought for the class was intimidating. Gently pushing myself through the block by doing google image searches, I ended up with more ideas than hours in the day. With more demands on my time, most of the second class session was spent sketching and setting up for painting the next week.
Spending a little time one afternoon with my camera, trying to capture a suitable image of one of the hummingbirds that frequent our feeder this time of year, rewarded me with my next muse.
Until recently, I didn’t understand the desire to record a time lapse of one’s drawing as can be done in Adobe Sketch unless you were trying to create a tutorial. I’ve taken several pictures of this one in progress and there are a number of things I love about it. Obviously, I can turn those images into these fun animated gifs, but it also helps me see values or other details from a different perspective. Like recording myself playing the mandolin, I like to look back and see how I decided to approach a section of the canvas.
The last observation I’d like to share is that despite having limited workspace, I’ve been able to keep my painting supplies set up as I’ve worked on Large and In Charge and that has helped to motivate. This reminds me of another parallel to playing the mandolin. My good friend and musician, Mark Dudrow suggested if I wanted to get serious about practicing, I needed to keep my mandolin out of the case. “Put it in your way, where you’ll see it every day,” he said. Make it easy to pick up.
That’s the real beauty with watercolor. The paints can dry out, and be reconstituted with just a drop or spray of water. I find myself eyeing the composition throughout the day; or even picking up the brush for a quick stroke, while I wait for something to heat up in the kitchen. It also reminds me of something I learned from Zentangle’s creators, “Anything is possible, one stroke at a time.”
