Farewell to January, a month that can contain big “reinvent the wheel” energy. I started the year feeling burnt out after the excitement of taking on a lot of illustration projects all at once, and I took an extended break from art making. But now that I’m back in my studio, I’ve been feeling like I have to learn how to make work all over again, despite trying to resist the “New Year, new me” enterprise. Of course, this isn’t true; it’s a matter of making the conditions right and noticing what is already there. Let’s chat about setting the stage, the discomfort of doing nothing, and using what we already have.
Some of the best advice I’ve received for sustaining a creative practice is to make it as easy and obvious as possible for yourself to jump in. For me recently, that’s meant making my studio feel like a place I want to work. I bought and assembled a storage cabinet to reign in some of the sprawling paper chaos, and I’m purging five years’ worth of scrap papers in the closet. (Joan Didion wrote that we would be “well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” If you want to test the limits of this practice, look no further than decluttering your old papers.) I’ve been doing “paint surgery” to revive dried-out tubes of gouache (still full of so much pigment!). It takes scissors, water, a few drops of honey, some elbow grease and a lot of patience, but I’m discovering unusual colours and giving myself easy access to prepared paints. Mise en place, as the chefs say. Make the conditions right.
I’ve tried to let it be an in-between month. I’ve tinkered, I’ve lounged, I’ve played. I worked on a silly little painting about how it feels to get my eyebrows done:
Last year I focused my artistic practice on growth, saying yes and taking risks. While I’d still like to continue that, this year I want to work on listening to my own wisdom, rather than looking so much to teachers and other artists as models for what my art can be. This requires getting quiet and still enough to hear my own voice underneath the noise of life. It means unplugging (most especially from Instagram). It means trying not to take another course, but integrating all the teachings I have already received (a thought very much on my mind since reading Carolyn Yoo’s article, “You don’t need another class”). It means remembering those everlasting things that I like, outside of what I see online (on that topic, I really enjoyed this conversation about how to discover your own taste). It means sitting in discomfort. It means, at times, doing nothing.
This is, of course, a great lesson of winter (or what little we still have of it in this warming world), the season of dark, stillness and quiet. There is little going on aboveground, as in this poem, Darling, by Sylvia Legris:
It may surprise no one that doing nothing (or even next to nothing) is incredibly difficult in practice. The stillness is messy. I’m confronted with things as they are now, not in an idealized future. The paint won’t layer right. The cupboards are full of chaos. My work doesn’t look like _____. Some of my dreams are still distant, private lists in a journal. I’m wondering what it looks like to feel this discomfort and then show up anyways. Perhaps: making ugly paintings, practicing figure drawing despite not getting the proportions “right,” or researching potential clients to pitch to even when I don’t think my work is good enough.
If we want to have and express our own ideas, we have to show up for them. Whether it’s daily or monthly, there’s a kind of un-glamorous discipline to any art, just like practising a musical instrument or improving at a sport. Having recently watched Iron Claw and taken up kickboxing last fall, I have been contemplating the many parallels between training for sports and art. Here’s Leanne Shapton, a former competitive swimmer turned illustrator/art director, from her wonderful book Swimming Studies:
“Artistic discipline and athletic discipline are kissing cousins, they require the same thing, an unspecial practice: tedious and pitch-black invisible, private as guts but always sacred.
…Whenever I begin a large project, and when, as a swimmer, I contemplate a practice, a mental image appears: a greyish Sisyphean mound I need to ignore in order to begin to climb. After twenty years I still search for the dumb focus I had as a competitive swimmer. After a hundred workouts I might be faster. After a hundred CBT sheets I might feel better. After a hundred lengths I might be healthier. After a hundred pages, a hundred sketchbooks, when will it feel right?”
Some of my best teachers, rather than showing me their way, showed me that I already have everything within me that I need to make good work. The hard part is continuing to show up: trusting myself enough to sit with my own ideas, to see them through rather than flitting, magpie-like, to the next shiny thing. New ideas hold a false promise of perfection just around the corner. But if I can get still and be mindful enough to pay attention to my own life, I might catch glimpses of extraordinary richness right in front of me - an endless well to draw upon for making unique work. This is a core motivation for me as an artist, and one of the things that ties all my work together: how to make small, seemingly ordinary moments and memories, the ones that are already right in front of me, feel important?
I think about the sketchbook I just filled, which took me two years to finish. It’s already filled with seeds for further work, little ideas I cached there to revisit later. I look through them and remember what I care about. I scrape the paint out of old tubes instead of buying a bunch of new materials. I resist “new year, new me” energy by looking at what I already have, materially and mentally.
Now over to you - how do you like to practice getting quiet, slowing down and turning to what you already have?
An assortment of nice things:
How winter affects our psyches: an older (from deep early pandemic days), encouraging conversation with travel writer Horatio Clare that I still think about often.
This gorgeous short film about what we might witness when we are still and present.
I have adored Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) since I was a teenager - very much an evergreen love. While cleaning out my closet, I discovered an old studio note I’d written to myself: “try using soft pastels contrasted with deep blacks/blues (from Japanese woodblock prints).” And, germane to our discussion, winter is a frequent subject matter in this genre. I’m looking forward to bringing these kinds of colour combinations into my work more:
I’ve spent some time this past month engaging with work that explores the idea of “mastery,” and whether one can judge “great art” without considering the artist’s biography, however nefarious. I read Claire Dederer’s book Monsters, then watched a classical music movie doubleheader - Maestro then Tár. Maestro has some very moving moments; Tár is a masterpiece on every level. As someone who spent a lot of time playing in orchestras as a young adult, I was fascinated by them both.
More music stuff: a profile of Jason Isbell. I also enjoyed the HBO documentary about him, Running With Our Eyes Closed.
Yet more music stuff: I am honoured to be this year’s featured visual artist at Coldsnap, Prince George’s week-long winter music festival! Big thanks to the Coldsnap folks, especially Katherine Benny, for giving me this opportunity. The festival starts this Friday, February 2nd, with shows every day until February 10th. If you’re in the area, look for my artwork on the festival programs, then come see a great performance and look for my art on T-shirts and tote bags at the merch table. My design features a night-time motif with just a handful of the tough plants and animals that hang around in northern winters:
I’ll end by sharing my own recent extraordinary ordinary moment - a few weeks ago, on a day too frigid to go outside, I looked out my kitchen window while making a coffee and saw these three beauties visiting:
❤️❤️❤️