Daily practise is many things, the obvious being improving skills, which includes the skill of being able to let it go more easily when things don’t go to plan.
Daily practise starts to yield bodies of work that help with deciding what you like, what you don’t like, and what you want to say with art.
Then there’s the things I keep coming up against when I’m doing these challenges for myself – my own patterns of procrastination and blocks.
I’ll maybe call them mini blocks, because they aren’t the months and years I have been blocked in the past, but they are blocks until I get myself over them.
Today as I was painting, eventually, I was musing about why it often takes me so long to get started, and some of the obvious things came up – perfectionism, etc. Now those are ingrained, I may never get over them, but I am less and less worried about work being imperfect.
The one thing that kept coming up as I was musing was that I’m often stressing about what to paint.
I know I have my morning (supposedly) sketch, followed by my one hour portrait, and my plan for this project was to do those things first, then paint other things with whatever time I had left. My problem arises in having no idea what portrait I’m going to use as a reference, and that quickly builds a story, completely ridiculous of course, that I don’t know what I’m doing, I’ll fail, yada yada.
So.
I’m going to experiment with myself, and choose a handful of references for the rest of this week, and designate them to a day, and see if that gees things up a bit. We’ll see.
My pissed off quine above taught me another lesson – walk away at half-time and leave the room, then come back and notice whether the deliciously buttery oil paint has swirled the lips further up the face with me noticing.
Or she could just have a more serious pout than usual.
It’s not up to me, now.
Til the morn,
Suzanne
415/500
Thrummie Bizzum 
Leave a comment