Ironic choice of topic, since I have not made a blog post in a very long time. But I’m still here, still making.

Last year I read (Author’s) “Find Your Artistic Voice”, which seemed like a pretty good goal to move forward.  Throughout the book a common refrain is on the importance of “showing up” to your artistic practice.  But what does that really mean?

For starters, we call it an art practice because even people at the peak of their career need to make time to do the work.

“Showing up” means I put my butt in my chair in front of my easel or drawing board, even though what I really want to do is lay on the couch and scroll aimlessly through social media.  Showing up means I put brush to canvas, pencil to paper, even when I really ought to glean the grout on my kitchen floor.  At its surface it makes sense, right?  You can’t make art if you’re not making art.

But the real meaning is that you have to show up, even if what you make might not be very good.

Nothing feels worse than spending an entire morning working on a painting and then going back to it an hour later and realizing it looks like crap.  But you have to be willing to make the crap, because that’s how you learn.  I see my kids getting frustrated because I can draw a princess better than they can but they don’t understand how many crappy awkward princess drawings I made when I was their age (and also sometimes now).  Showing up means embracing your ability to sit and do the work and have nothing to show for it at the end, except maybe a loose idea about what you could do differently the next time you show up.

Does size matter?

There’s always been something magical about those gigantic canvases on the top shelf in the store.  At the museum, life size portraits, landscapes that stretch across your field of vision, drawing you in.

When I started painting, I went for, at minimum, 16 by 20 inch canvas.  I wanted that grandness.  But I wasn’t ready for it.  My “aha” moment came when I read Carol Marine’s “Daily Painting”, at the very beginning when she talks about not feeling like a real unless you work on huge canvases.  The problem was, I rarely finished any of these, and the ones I did, I didn’t like.

After reading Marine’s book, and seeing many other artists’ small works on social media, I gave it a try.  I bought a stack of 5×7 canvas boards, and dug in.  Suddenly, I was producing work I really liked, and finding myself enjoying painting even more. Even better, working small actually gave me MORE space to experiment and learn about things like paint handling, color mixing, and overall process.  Spending less time on a single piece let me feel free to paint the same subject more than once, and helped me get over my fear that every piece had to be “perfect”.

So while I’m still tempted by the canvases that are bigger than me, my rack of blank canvases in the studio is dominated by lots of little blank pages waiting to be filled.

Sometimes you don’t get it quite right the first time.

Sometimes you want to look at an object from a different angle, focus on a different detail, maybe you’ve thought of a better composition. 

Paint it as many times as you want to, need to, can.   Become an expert in that one item.

When I was first starting out, the idea of painting the same thing twice seemed like a waste of time to me.  Why would I spend my precious time painting the same thing twice when I had SO MANY IDEAS to get to?  

But sometimes the execution didn’t go as planned – the colors were muddy, the composition was off, I was feeling rushed – and the result didn’t match the feeling I wanted to convey. As I began to paint more frequently, I found myself tempted to revisit these earlier subjects

I keep a folder on my desktop of photos I’ve taken for future inspiration.  One of my favorites was a pitcher of sunflowers.  I made three different paintings based on this one photo last year: a small 5 by 7 study on board (ex. 1), done quickly in one afternoon, followed by a larger version on canvas (ex. 2).  The second one came out better than the first, but still didn’t feel satisfying.

There’s a reason we call them “studies” – repetition until a subject is learned – observation, practice, experimentation all part of the fun. I took what I had learned from the first two paintings and applied them to a third (ex. 3). What do you think?