Building Habits that make Painting Daily Automatic

"Queen of Diamonds"  20 x 20 mixed media on canvas

If your paintings could talk, what would they say?  I think mine would want me to set them free!  They would want me to let loose instead of trying to control every move. We’ve all been taught to think carefully before we make a brush stroke and to know what we’re going to do before it happens. But that creates anxiety doesn’t it? If you’re like me my hand begins to shake and I stress over “getting it right.”

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.” Jon Barrie, author of Peter Pan from Jan. 2015 Woman’s Day.

Those doubts tighten your muscles, the flow of paint, and the release of energy that makes your composition exciting. Having a well thought out plan is one thing. Allowing spontaneity to occur and to alter your initial concept is when the “magic” happens.

“A watched pot never boils.” When you keep too tight a reign on every stroke, every composition, or you over analyze your progress, you may miss out on something enchanting and remarkable. Let it happen! Just do it.

"Cafe' Costa Rica" 20 x 20 acrylic on canvas

If your paints could talk, what would they say? Mine would be angry with the disorganized mess, with the damaged caps from using a nut cracker to get them off, and the crimped twisted tubes, etc. A neat freak I’m not! I get so caught up in painting I sometimes forget that a neater pallet and a more organized paint box would actually make my job easier.

Recently I subscribed to Eric Maisel’s “Sunday Newsletter: Emotional Healing”. With my free subscription, Eric had a free gift: “The 97 Best Creativity Tips Ever” by Eric Maisel, 2011 all rights reserved.

I’m going to share with you the first 10 tips on Eric’s list.

1.  Be consistent in showing up. Getting to your creative work only once in a while won’t keep it alive. Make “routine” and “regularity” sacred words!

2.  Who knows how many artists fail because the light that shines through them is refracted in a thousand directions and not concentrated in a single beam? Pick projects and complete them! It is not really possible to work on a thousand things at once.

3.  One of the best ways to help yourself create every day is to craft a starting ritual that you begin to use regularly and routinely. When your ritual becomes habitual you will find yourself moving effortlessly from not creating to creating.

4.  Make the following pledge: “I will do some creative work every day, if only for fifteen or twenty minutes.” Honor your pledge for the next two weeks and spend fourteen consecutive days creating.

5.  Looking for only the perfect time to create? Forget about it! You are always in the middle of something so it is right in the middle of things that your creating must also happen.

6.  Even small amounts of time can be used for creating. Do you make use of fifteen minutes here and twenty minutes there?

7.  Are you good at capturing your own creative thoughts? Or do you let them slip away by telling yourself that they weren’t really all that good or all that important? Stop that! Start right now doing a better job of capturing and recording your ideas.

8.  You must reckon with your own character. Creativity requires curiosity. Are you curious enough? Creativity requires risk-taking. Are you willing to risk? Creativity requires energy. Can you marshal and unleash your energy? Creativity requires patience. Have you cultivated that quality? Turn yourself into the artist you need to be!

9.  Telling our truth can bring us pain and get us into trouble, but worse pain and worse trouble await us if we keep silent. Tell your truth—carefully, artfully, and courageously!

10.  Say yes to your creative work! Avoid maybe like the plague. Maybe is a state that takes you right to the edge of meaninglessness. Maybe plays to your weaknesses, your anxieties, and your doubts. Maybe frustrates you and disappoints you. Avoid the maybe trap!

Self-Taught Artists Emerge after Grueling Hard Work and Physical Pain

"Cafe Costa Rica" 20x20 acrylic on canvas (SOLD), Prints available

As a self-taught artist myself, I wanted to shine a light on the anguish and healing that many of us share in common. I’ve chosen a few artists that are famous and well-known, and a few who never got above the sad circumstances of their lives until long after their deaths.

Many artists were driven to art in the process of mending from a long-term illness or accident. Once they tasted the sweet wine of creation, they found the healing balm of discovery and newness of life. While their minds and hearts were caught up in the rapture of creativity, they forgot about self-pity and pain and unleashed it instead upon paper, wood and canvas. 

My own early beginnings happened after a painful divorce. Remarkable magic occurs when emotions travel from brain and heart through the arm, into the fingers, down the brush and onto a blank surface. Explosions of the mind keep you focused and stayed on what’s happening before your eyes. The smoothness of paint encourages experimentation and afterward, you are never the same.

Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 and died in 1954. In 1922, she entered the National Preparatory School with the intent to study medicine and medical illustration. Three years later, she was in a near-fatal bus accident, which left her with many broken bones, including her legs, ribs, back, and collarbone. While recovering from the accident, she began to paint.

In 1928, she sought out Diego Rivera, a Mexican Rivera, for advice on her works, and would later marry him. Her paintings were surrealist. She used bright colors, and often depicted Mexican folk themes. Her first one-woman art show was in New York in 1938. In 1953, she had her first solo show in Mexico. Her work began to gain more attention in the 1970s, and many of her works are displayed in her former residence. Her bright outdoor scenes and bold self-portraits continue to amuse and delight us.

(Henri Rousseau -- Fight between a tiger and a buffalo)

Henri Rousseau was a post-Impressionist painter who was born in 1844 and died in 1910. He worked for a lawyer and a toll collector to support his mother and wife. It was his job as a toll collector that would earn him the nickname "Le Douanier" (customs office.) Ridiculed during his lifetime by critics, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality.

Rousseau began to paint in his early 40's and would retire at 49 to focus on painting full-time. He taught himself by copying art displayed at the Louvre, but would go on to establish his own style of painting. His paintings are noted for their flat style and great imagination. His most famous works depict jungle scenes, though he never saw a jungle. Several of his paintings are on display at the Louvre.

Winslow Homer was an American landscape artist who was born in 1836 and died in 1910. He was mainly self-taught and spent 20 years as a commercial illustrator before taking up oil painting full-time. He would open his own studio in New York City in 1859 and started to take classes at the National Academy of Design. By this time, he was already producing a great number of works. His early paintings often depict rural farm scenes. Later paintings would display marine subjects, such as fishermen and boating. He would later become best known for his paintings with marine themes.

Riet van Halder is a Dutch housewife who began to draw and paint at the age of fifty-nine after a voice urged her to do so while she was vacuuming the house.” Her family found it strange to see her suddenly become absorbed in painting. In the Netherlands, she had easy access to a vast array of ink, paint, and other media, which she explored in her art. She preferred paint applied with a multitude of implements on a variety of high quality paper and linen. Fittingly, she used a varied color palette. Her paintings are often densely populated with swirling, free form human and animal figures, which have predominately benevolent expressions.

“Her drawings are a response to an imagined world that is revealed, dreamlike, in the act of drawing and painting.” She explained that after finishing a work she was as captured by its beauty and mystery as a first time viewer. In 2004, her ability to create was ended abruptly by chemotherapy, which she received for a melanoma on her ear.

Woodie Long grew up in a family of twelve in a racially mixed sharecropping community in Plant City, Florida. As a young man, he worked as a sharecropper and itinerant laborer. He told me that he had picked just about every crop that existed in the southeastern US. Most of his life, Long was employed as a professional contract painter. This work took him as far as Saudi Arabia, where he met his wife, Dot. Long said that there he became acquainted with the Prince, now King, while painting the Palace and other Royal buildings. Dot and Woodie subsequently traveled for a year in Southeast Asia before they settled in south Alabama to be near family.

Long began his memory paintings in 1988 while recuperating from a respiratory illness brought on by long-term exposure to oil paint. 

He was a great storyteller, and was often encouraged by family and friends to recount his own experiences. He saw his wife’s hobby watercolor set as a good way to record his memories. Long certainly knew how to handle a brush and during his career had experimented occasionally with painting figures. He told me that on jobs, he often created a large image on each wall before painting over it.

Melissa Polhamus was born in Ludwigsburg, Germany. She is the adopted daughter of a U.S. military serviceman and his wife and grew up in several different East Coast military towns. She earned a degree in history from Virginia Polytechnic University. “In 1989, she began to draw from her own imagination while recuperating from depression suffered in the wake of an automobile accident.”

Polhamus is self-taught as an artist. Her undiluted watercolor and ink drawings are characterized by intense, densely fragmented compositions. “She has described the process of creating these works as entirely spontaneous and intuitive.” They have a dreamlike narrative quality in which convoluted environments are typically inhabited by cartoonish clothed figures as they carry out various activities that are alternately mundane, mysterious, or sinister, through a labyrinth of interconnected spaces. “Her drawings often include peculiar vehicles, weaponry, musical instruments, stylized vegetation and jaggedly geometric patterns that contribute to a pervasive sense of anxiety.” They are mysteriously compelling and consistently original in style. From a distance, the palette and patterns of her work may resemble certain Mexican Folk drawings.

Thank you to the following Gallery for providing these bios and paintings:

Building Habits that make Painting Daily Automatic

If your paintings could talk, what would they say?  I think mine would want me to set them free!  They would want me to let loose instead of trying to control every move. We’ve all been taught to think carefully before we make a brush stroke and to know what we’re going to do before it happens. But that creates anxiety doesn’t it? If you’re like me my hand begins to shake and I stress over “getting it right.”

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it,” said Jon Barrie, author of Peter Pan from Jan. 2015 Woman’s Day.

Those doubts tighten your muscles, the flow of paint, and the release of energy that makes your painting exciting. Having a well thought out plan is one thing. Allowing spontaneity to occur and to alter your initial composition is when the “magic” happens.

“A watched pot never boils.” When you keep too tight a reign on every stroke, every composition, and over analyze your progress, you may miss out on something enchanting and remarkable. Let it happen! Just do it.

If your paints could talk, what would they say? Mine would be angry with the disorganized mess, with the damaged caps from using a nut cracker to get them off, and the crimped twisted tubes, etc. A neat freak I’m not! I get so caught up in painting I sometimes forget that a neater pallet and a more organized paint box would actually make my job easier.

Recently I subscribed to Eric Maisel’s Sunday newsletter: "Emotional Healing”. With my free subscription, Eric gave me a free gift: “The 97 Best Creativity Tips Ever” by Eric Maisel, 2011 all rights reserved.

I’m going to share with you the first 10 tips  from Eric’s amazing list.

1.  Be consistent in showing up. Getting to your creative work only once in a while won’t keep it alive. Make “routine” and “regularity” sacred words!

2.  Who knows how many artists fail because the light that shines through them is refracted in a thousand directions and not concentrated in a single beam? Pick projects and complete them! It is not really possible to work on a thousand things at once.

3.  One of the best ways to help yourself create every day is to craft a starting ritual that you begin to use regularly and routinely. When your ritual becomes habitual you will find yourself moving effortlessly from not creating to creating.

4.  Make the following pledge: “I will do some creative work every day, if only for fifteen or twenty minutes.” Honor your pledge for the next two weeks and spend fourteen consecutive days creating.

5.  Looking for only the perfect time to create? Forget about it! You are always in the middle of something so it is right in the middle of things that your creating must also happen.

6.  Even small amounts of time can be used for creating. Do you make use of fifteen minutes here and twenty minutes there?

7.  Are you good at capturing your own creative thoughts? Or do you let them slip away by telling yourself that they weren’t really all that good or all that important? Stop that! Start right now doing a better job of capturing and recording your ideas.

8.  You must reckon with your own character. Creativity requires curiosity. Are you curious enough? Creativity requires risk-taking. Are you willing to risk? Creativity requires energy. Can you marshal and unleash your energy? Creativity requires patience. Have you cultivated that quality? Turn yourself into the artist you need to be!

9.  Telling our truth can bring us pain and get us into trouble, but worse pain and worse trouble await us if we keep silent. Tell your truth—carefully, artfully, and courageously!

10.  Say yes to your creative work! Avoid maybe like the plague. Maybe is a state that takes you right to the edge of meaninglessness. Maybe plays to your weaknesses, your anxieties, and your doubts. Maybe frustrates you and disappoints you. Avoid the maybe trap! 

If you want Eric’s free gift of “97 creative ways to keep working” sign up for his Sunday newsletter “Emotional Healing” or email him @ ericmaisel@hotmail.com

The Abbreviated World of Twitters and Tweets

"Maestro" 9 x 12 Pastel on Bristol

 Most of us Tweet, even though we’re not convinced it does anything for our business. The overwhelming number of tweets sent and received each day means that many are not read, let alone acted upon.

I discussed this with my son-in-law over Christmas (perhaps argue would describe it better) about whether social media and Twitter in particular increased sales or business. His conjecture was that it did not. My attitude was more positive, as I know for a fact that it has increased readership for my Christian articles.

It would be great to get your feedback on how social media and Twitter has either helped or hindered your business, i.e. does it waste precious time, etc.

When I first started tweeting, I tried to make my tweets profound, or at least somewhat interesting. 

Many of them had some good advice. I’m “retweeting” some of them in place of my blog today:

“My tools; my soul mates: pencils, brushes, paint joining together in pursuit of excellence; changing darkness into light and breathing life into shapes and forms.

“Hands tell a story. Their calluses and wrinkles define us. We talk and express delight with hands. We applaud those things we love. Handy!

“Lift up your heart to the music of creation. Paint the world fantastic. Let nature ring. Bring on the brush, baby!

“Artists deal in illusion, turning flat lines into forms and shapes that pull the viewer into a greater understanding of the world.

“An art show is like performing without a script. The fluid style of color and shape express the unspoken words of the heart.

“Touching brush to canvas, the artist consummates a passion-filled marriage that explodes into droplets of agony and ecstasy, fire and ice.

“An artist’s prayer: wrap my soul in your love Lord; whisper into my heart and draw out a masterpiece that awakens the world.

“A good painting provides eye calisthenics, inviting us to explore the details, subtleties, and deeper realms of human thought within.”

Do you have a favorite saying or tweet? Share them with us!

Are You a Neat Freak or do You Thrive in Organized Clutter?

"Kelly's Rose" oil on board 12x16

I used to pride myself on being organized. I had to be with six children! I prepared meal plans so I wouldn’t have to think about “what’s for dinner?” A monthly meal plan gave me an edge. Shopping smart and planning ahead kept our meals on time and within budget.

Over time, I did give up on having our home look like “Better Homes and Gardens.” I learned to tolerate a lived in look; cleaning only once a week. I ignored what happened in between because I valued my time, and it was impossible for me to do anything more.

I became an avid list maker. I found that once I put it on a list, I could forget about it. The worry and the guilt were “out of sight and out of mind.” It cleared my head. I looked at my list at the start of each day and checked off my priorities. No worry. No fuss.

"Hibiscus Glory" Oil on 16x20 canvas  SOLD

Of course, there was always the unexpected pushing some items to another day. For the most part, these lists kept me in line. I took classes, I was a free-lance writer, and I was active in my church and community. I have found over the years that too much neatness can kill creativity

.

I’m not knocking organization. I’m just saying that organized clutter, for me, is the best way to manage stress and to meet deadlines. Take my desk. It’s never clean. There are small piles (organized piles) everywhere. Each one represents a different project. When someone comes to visit, I arrange the piles in orderly fashion, but they stay! Like fingertip files, I know where to look when I need something.

"Jack's Roses" oil on canvas  SOLD

My guest room/art room is the same way. I have organized piles on the bed, in the closet, and behind the door. The difference between the desk and my art room is that everything disappears and is moved to another area for the duration of guests when necessary.

My palette is no different. To another painter, it may seem sloppy and disorganized. But to me, I know exactly what I need and want at any given moment. When I use acrylics, I put out only the paint I think I’ll need for a specific purpose or it dries out. With oils, I’ll put out more paint. I don’t organize my palette as well as some artists do. I place light colors on one side and medium to dark on the other; that's it.

By the time I’m through painting for the day, there is no definition left, anyway.  I mix and match. I take swipes of different colors, mixing on the canvas when appropriate. I have watched other artists paint; their “neatness” is amazing. Their clothing or cover-ups, their arms and faces are clean. During their painting session, they wipe their palette of residue and to separate piles of paint. Neat. Neat. Neat.

"He Lives"  oil on 16x20 wrapped canvas

When I’m through painting, I may have splotches of color on my nose, my arm, and my clothes.  I lose myself in painting. My imagination soars when I’m unfettered by rules and restrictions from the “how to” experts.

Some people may see a big mess, a desk in disarray or an unworkable palette. I see organized clutter ready to be turned into something magnificent and memorable.

Dreams Light a Fire Beneath us – Reality Grounds us

Exercising imagination is critical to the artist’s life. Whether you write, perform, paint or draw, working from research and knowledge is not enough. An artist must interpret, design, and create. An artist’s work must represent his unique perspective on the world.

Artists need buyers, teachers, supporters, lovers, friends, and constant inspiration for their work. Knowing who you are and what you think about issues is critical. Having opinions and knowing why you have them brings clarity and purpose to your work. Everything an artist sees, hears, and learns becomes a stepping stone that leads to creation.

In order to grow, we must have our feet grounded in reality. We must make logical and conscious decisions every day concerning our finances, our basic needs, and the people we interact with. Constantly flowing between a living reality and a fantasy land or a dream world of our own making definitely poses problems.

"Raccoons at Sunrise"

I don’t know about you, but when I’m in creative mode, my friends and loved ones may literally have to drag me away. They may have to repeat themselves often as I escape into la la land. I may seem moody and aloof at times. I may appear distant and detached from their needs and wants.

Finding a balance between these two worlds is critical to an artist’s survival. Supportive people who share our dreams, or at least understand them, can make all the difference. Knowing us, caring about us requires effort, patience, and maturity.

The artist must also learn to compartmentalize his life in order to find balance between the realities of the here and now, and the need to make a living; between living within your means, and recognizing that others have important needs, too.

“No man is an island,” said John Donne (1572-1631). Writing a series of devotionals for Christians, he spoke about a bell that rings not only to call the preacher to come, but the congregation. The importance of Donne’s concept is also expressed in other religions, particularly Buddhism.

“…No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

"Sand Crane Dreams" 

And it tolls for me. It tolls for you. We’re all involved with mankind. As artists our greatest joy is in giving back to humanity, to the world we love, our personal take and interpretation of it.