Motivation and Discipline Don't Help

My art studio, 2004

This was one half of my small kitchen in the 1-bedroom apartment I lived in. I did not have stable north light, so I hung a sheer white curtain to filter the direct sunlight.

In 2004 I took a class that taught me the basic historic technique for creating a layered oil painting. To practice I set up this little studio in my kitchen and a did a painting using the method I was learning in the class. 

Study for Vase and Creamer

9 x 9 inches, pencil on paper

2004

The still life was the first drawing and the first oil painting I had done on my own in about 10 years. I was exhilarated and thrilled, and mostly just so relieved when I made this little painting.

Vase and Creamer

9 x 9 inches, oil on panel

2004

It had taken me years of "thawing out" a severe, crippling artists' block to get to the point where I could even attempt to make a painting.

...

For many years after I graduated from art school at RISD I was very discouraged as an artist. I did not ever make any art on my own, outside the occasional life-drawing class. I felt like I was an artist. But a real artist paints, and I was not painting. I felt like I "should" be painting. 

I think I was stymied by my idea of what art and painting should be, by my idea of what was "Important Art."

Important Art was what was showing in the New York gallery scene of the 1990's, or in the New York MOMA. Important Art was what my art school friends who went on to do Masters of Fine Arts degrees were doing: very large, abstract or semi-abstract paintings.

I had never had an inclination to paint abstractly, and the semi-abstract figure-ish work I was introduced to in art school looked to me like what an insane person might paint.

All that was interesting to me intellectually, and I liked to look at it and talk about it with my friends, and I admired many of them for their skill with painting abstractly, but I never felt a shred of desire to paint that way.

But the only other option for a painter, other than Abstract or Figurative (semi-abstract figure-ish), was to be a Bad Artist. A bad artist was a "sellout" who sold pictures of flowers or children or seascapes at tourist galleries. I was very afraid that if I made that kind of art I would be a Bad Artist.

I left art school believing that Important Art came entirely or mostly from your head, and that art done while looking at something in real life was just a "study". Landscape, Figure, Portrait, and Still Life were all ok to do as studies, but if you were to do that for your real Work, you would fall into the category of Bad Artist.

I had been accepted into the most prestigious art school in the country based on my high school portfolio of highly realistic drawings and paintings done from life. And then I was taught that that was not art.

So, feeling like I was never going to be a Real Artist much less an Important Artist, I just stopped making art. I described myself to acquaintances as a designer, never as an artist.

For years I let people people assume I'd majored in design at the Rhode Island School of Design, and did not reveal that I'd spent all of my 4 years there doing figure drawing and oil painting.

But over the years after art school I got very depressed. I put in hours at my graphic design job, and mostly just killed time between my working and sleeping hours.

But I always knew what my problem was, I always knew that I would feel better if I could start painting. So I tried very hard for a lot of years to start painting. In fact, in my head, I was trying very hard to get back to painting pretty much all of the time.These were the things I tried:

• Trying to be "disciplined"
• Trying to be "motivated"
• Making plans to do x just 10 minutes a day
• Being angry and disappointed at myself
• Putting enormous pressure on myself

I did a LOT of that, all the time, for many years, and none of it was successful for helping me get back to making art. It just made me feel worse.

I began to realize that my idea that I might be a Bad Artist was stopping me from doing ANYTHING creative. So I decided to do the smallest, tiniest project that felt creative but that was NOT ART. As soon as I called it art, I could not make myself do it. 

So the smallest, easiest thing I could find to do, that was a tiny bit creative, was going to a fabric store and buying buttons. I spent a long time picking out the buttons. I did not make anything with them, I just bought them.

It sounds so silly, and it's completely embarrassing to me that that was my creative project. It was embarrassing to me even then, when I did it. But I had gotten to such a low point of despair, that doing something so small and insignificant as buying buttons felt better than the way I felt most the time.

After I bought the buttons, and did some more equally small "creative projects", and after a while I felt inspired to play with collage. I had experimented with collage in art school, and so I started collecting materials again and making collages again. I did this on my living room floor, with the TV on. I made about 20 of these:

"The Stage", 2003
9 x 12, mixed media on paper

Then, in 2003 I saw the movie "The Girl with the Pearl Earring", which is about Vermeer. The movie imagines that the subject of his famous painting is his young maid, whom he trains to mix his paints. The movie is beautifully shot, with gorgeous sequences showing Scarlet Johansson sifting pigments and mixing oils by soft Dutch light filtered through small windowpanes. 

I started wondering if anyone taught how to do Old Masters' painting techniques any more, and if I could learn any of that. A few months later I found Kirstine Reiner's ad for art classes on Craigslist, offering lessons on mixing paint pigments and Old Master oil techniques. In early 2004 I signed up for 10 lessons.... and for the first time in many years, I picked up a paintbrush.

...

So many of my students struggle with how to set up a consistent practice outside of class hours. I can see the pressure they are putting on themselves, and their frustration. 

I tell them to remember learning to drive a car as a teenager: There is no way you could learn to drive if you only practiced an hour or two a week in Driver's Ed for a couple months. You had to put in dozens, maybe hundreds of hours behind the wheel for a few years before driving a car started to feel completely comfortable and natural. Learning to paint is exactly like that. As the instructor, I can give you some help and ideas and guidelines, but to get a feel for painting, you just have to do it on your own for a few hundred hours.

But I know it's hard to find a way to put in those hours. 

If you want to paint and you are not painting, then whatever you are currently doing to try to paint is not working, so try something completely different.

Instead, just do the smallest thing you can call "creative." Go for a walk and take some snapshots. But if you plan to do that and you find the weekend goes by and you didn't get around to it, do something smaller: just go browse in a flower shop or bicycle shop. And if that does not happen, just notice a crack in the pavement with some moss growing in it. Just stop and look at something that interests you for 5 seconds. 

That's it, you are being creative.

We are all creative all the time, we just don't realize it. If you want to paint, you probably already notice things around you all the time you wish you could paint or draw. Our ideas about what is Art, or what is Real Art, or what is Good Art versus Bad Art , don't help us to actually be artists. Don't focus on being a good artist. Don't try to be motivated or disciplined, don't even try to be an Artist. 

Just focus your attention on what interests you in your normal, day-to-day life, starting with just a few seconds or minutes at a time. The rest takes care of itself.

Sterling Boat: Session 10

Sterling Boat - DETAIL - work in progress

oil on panel

See the previous post about this painting here

Sterling Boat - PREVIOUS DETAIL

The painting is coming down to the final stages, I'm hoping to be done in just a few more sessions. This is the stage of the painting when it gets hard to record the difference with a camera. I'm sorry to say the differences between the two above shots represents a solid 6 hours of work! The refinement is subtle but significant in real life, but almost impossible to see by the time the camera has degraded the images.

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts today called "On the Media", and they were talking about the evolution of the book (OTM Episode: Book 2.0) now that we are crossing over into a digital era for reading. They interviewed writers and book publishers and future-thinkers who all had opinions, ranging from "it's not a book unless it has paper and glue and survives being dipped in the bathtub" to "the age of paper is dead and everyone will be reading in an entirely different way in 5 years."

One of the future-embracers was positing that the way writers WRITE will change in the new era, and floated his vision of a writer writing a novel live, online, with a real-time audience who will be intimately involved in the writing process, and that the whole process of creating a book with be collaborative and public. To which I though AAACK!!!

The interviewer suggested that many writers feel that solitude while working is integral to the process, and that some writers would not WANT to write if it had to be a public, collaborative process. The book-futurist (sorry I don't have his name, I don't take notes on my audio sources, unlike my husband who wisely documents everything he hears) said something to the point of "well, writers will just have to change they way they think about writing".

Writers will just have to change they way they think about writing. Wha????

As a an artist, I am probably on the leading edge of those who feel comfortable being public with my process - between my blog posts, my videos, and my teaching I try to make my process as transparent as possible, mostly for my own benefit of processing what I am learning, but also because some of you out there seem to enjoy seeing the thoughts behind the work. And yet, if I were forced to both share my process and allowed my visitors to comment on my decisions in real-time as I made them, and also modify my painting as the comments poured in, I would probably put down the brush and find something else to do!

I might be the extreme though, in that I shy away from collaboration, but some artists are more open to it. Personally, I need to be handled very carefully when I am in "work mode", as anyone who worked with me as a graphic designer can attest, I am not at all a "team player" when I am trying to be creative!

What do other artists think? Could you work with an audience? Even performing artists - could the musician practice with an interactive audience, could the actor rehearse with an interactive audience? Does it sound like a nightmare to you, or does it sound like a revolutionary frontier for artmaking?

------UPCOMING CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS-----------
I teach Classical Realism drawing and painting classes and workshops in my north light San Francisco studio. I also offer workshops at other locations in the US. Please visit my Teaching page for more information and to register!

Sterling Boat: Session 8

Sterling Boat - DETAIL

Sterling Boat - DETAIL - previous stage
See previous post about this painting here

Today I worked on the wax paper - another 4-hour session. It shows how the wax paper slowly starts to look like transparent crumpled material, instead of only gradations of paint.

Painting is 99% drawing by the way. I never believed it more than I believe it now. If you want to be a better painter, study more drawing. I am amazed by how the same principles I teach the most beginning drawing student are the principles I must hold as my mantra all day every day: Look for the large shapes, bracket the values, work large to small and from shadow up to light...

It even applies to color, because you can't build a believable range of hue without understanding value bracketing.

Drawing is learning when it is appropriate to focus your decision-making on a particular scale: solve large problems first and smaller problems later. Use the problems that appear at a small scale to find solutions to the larger-scale problems.

Learning to draw is the discipline of ONLY tackling the problems you can solve at THIS stage of the artwork, without getting distracted or confused.

I've come to believe that drawing (and artmaking in general) is about organizing your thought process, and nothing else at all.

How To Save a Drowning Drawing or Painting

Every artist knows the feeling: As we work on a piece we slowly become aware that our painting or drawing is not progressing, but instead it is moving further and further away from what we want it to look like. We work faster and faster, desperately fixing and adjusting, but the piece just gets worse and worse and we get more and more confused about what to do.

I call this "circling the drain" because we watch as our painting or drawing spirals right down into the sewer.

From observing my own process and also how my students sometimes get lost, I have found that this is the result of one single, simple problem, and there is one single, simple thing we can do to halt the downward spiral and salvage the work:

LOOK.

Easy enough, but it's amazing how often we all forget to look at our subject. Our tendency is to just stare at our own artwork and fiddle, which just makes the problem worse.

This is what I have posted in my studio to remind myself what to do when I get lost:

Look LARGE

Look OFTEN

Look LONG

This is what I mean by each of these:

Look LARGE

We naturally tend to zoom in our vision, narrow our focus, and look at tiny areas. Then we inch our way around the subject as if we are drawing by looking through a drinking straw. This makes mountains of molehills; literally, small variations on a contour are magnified when we zoom in. It also tends to make us exaggerate differences in value, so we make a dark patch too dark and a light patch too light.

The key is to back up and look at your artwork and your subject with large vision, comparing every part to every other part instead of focusing on small areas. Scan for the largest shapes, move your vision around often: if you are drawing a figure's head, move down and draw the feet for a while. Compare values deeps in the shadows to values far away in the light areas. Draw the whole, not the parts. Think big.

Look OFTEN

We all have a tendency to hunker behind our easels with our nose to our own artwork. After a while, we forget to ever peek around the easel at all and we end up drawing or painting essentially from our imagination. But if you discipline yourself to make a mark and LOOK before you make another mark you will suddenly find the painting or drawing flying along easily, growing magically from under your brush or pencil. Mark, look, mark, look, mark, look.....

Look LONG

When we are really, really lost, sheer panic sets in. That's when we have the urge to keep working faster and faster, and the artwork falls out of control at an alarming rate. When I get really, really lost I put down my brush and just stop and look at my subject. Then I bounce my vision between my subject and my artwork, back and forth, without ever making a mark. The longer I can discipline myself to look without making a mark at all, the clearer it becomes what needs to be adjusted. I tell my students to put down their charcoal and make a mental list of THREE things to change before they pick up their charcoal again.

A note on self deception:

Sometimes a piece of artwork is falling out of control but we can't admit it. We are too attached to the work we have already put in, and we want the artwork to be better than it is. This is where integrity comes in: the artist must hold themselves to the highest standard, otherwise no learning or exploration is happening. If we tell ourselves our art is "good enough" it isn't. That is self-deception.

To be art, it must be better than "good enough".

Do what it takes to learn and get better with every mark of every piece. Otherwise, we may as well go find a less demanding endeavor. Why be an artist, if not to get better?

--------TEACHING-----------

I am planning my teaching schedule for 2010 so take a look at my teaching page and sign up for my mailing list to be notified when I post new classes and workshops.

Blocking In (new wax paper series)

Wrapped Silver Goblet (in progress)

11 x 14 inches

graphite pencil on trace paper

I have a couple teaching opportunities coming up which I am very excited about: I'll be teaching drawing this fall semester to first-year MFA grad students at San Francisco's Academy of Art University, and there are plans in the works to possibly do a couple workshops next year (I'll keep you posted).

All of these opportunities are really exciting, and as I have been thinking about them I find I am "teaching" myself as I work all the time. Observing myself as I work helps me avoid problems deeper in the drawing. It's a sort of narration: At first it was non-verbal narration, simply paying attention to what I see and and comparing that to my drawing. But since I have begun teaching, that internal narration is becoming more and more verbal, as I imagine how I would teach as I draw.

I've been working the last couple days to begin a few new paintings of still life, and my first step is using straight-line block-in to establish the composition and forms.

Wrapped Bottle (in progress)

graphite pencil on trace paper

6 x 8 inches

Block-in for me is always the most stressful stage of a painting or drawing. Positioning the correct placement and shape on that blank space feels like plotting a course across the Atlantic.

I put the first few lines down and for a short while I feel like everything is going great, and then as I move into the next level of detail the errors begin to show up. And since the initial block-in is defining the whole shape with only a few lines, the errors are usually quite drastic and devastating to the design. Panic!

Beach Stone and Wax Paper (in progress)

graphite pencil on trace paper

5 x 5 inches

I tell my students that drawing well is essentially learning to control a sense of constant panic (I say that because I think a lot of us are quietly panicking in drawing class, and it helps the students know everyone else is feeling the same way, including me.)

But I try to use that panic to my advantage. The "Oh, no, it's all wrong!" feeling can plummet any draughtsman into despair and temptation to abandon the drawing (or crumple, scribble, or burn it).... But it's also a useful feeling. If we can react to the feeling with calm and acceptance, and simply take it as a reminder to stop and look, it becomes a useful tool.

My confidence in the block-in process has grown with my experience and now I know if something is wrong, if I keep my head calm and just look, I'll probably figure out the problem.

Not that I always do a perfect block-in by any means. And I certainly do not do my best block-ins when I am demonstrating in front of a group. But like any mental/emotional discipline, the more you practice, the easier it is to tap into problem-solving mode and focus, even in stressful situations.