Confidence, Art and Life

I have a weird attitude. I may be giving bad advice sometimes by coming from a completely different perspective. Or I may be giving good advice where it's needed most. I could be doing both in the same paragraph, depending on who's reading it. So take this as an essay both in general about art and specifically on pastels, because pastel has become my heart-medium.

Pastels are instant gratification. I want to paint it, bang, I do. There it is. Big and bold and visible across the room. I paint small for a pastelist except on very good days but pastels make it possible for me to paint at all most times, because of that speed and power.

This essay is in answer to a forum post where a new friend said something that made me think. I had mentioned I didn't have the space to paint large complex still lifes, so I've been doing small simple studies. I'm drifting into the 6" square format of the Daily Painters and thoroughly enjoying it. This friend compared that to my dipping my toe in the pool, then wrapping the towel around my hips and walking away calling that my daily swim.

Well yeah, actually that is my daily swim. The fact that I was able to do it at all makes it a good day. On a bad day my daily swim would be a two inch long gesture sketch of my cat while he sleeps, something I could probably do without even looking at him because I've done it hundreds of times. He said it was a mystery because other painters with even less space managed to do larger, complex still lifes.

Well, the mystery is solved. I did answer and tell him it wasn't just space but disability. Because he's right. If I was abled, I wouldn't mind getting up and sweeping ALL the food stuff off the dresser, set up a still life, sketch and photo it, live out of boxes for eating for a while till the painting's done (or just work from the photo) and then put all the food back. About like the kind of vigorous housemate who lets the apartment turn into a wreck and then every month or two blitz cleans it over one weekend - and saves time for video gaming overall because that blitz was relatively easy for him.

Heck, I might still live in a place too small for complex still life and just go out to sit on the sidewalk and paint a window display in a shop instead, because that caught my eye. Even make more than one bus trip to get back to the antique shop to do that. There's more than one way to scan a cat.

I adapted to physical disabilities before I knew I had them. This has shaped my attitudes about everything in life and I was constructively lazy for most of it so far. Everything I do to make myself comfortable has an immediate self rewarding effect that I'll actually do more. Someone abled and overworked might find comfort irresistible and prefer to sleep or watch TV or socialize when they could be painting and would enjoy painting if they gave themselves a bit of a push to do it. But someone who's always in pain and usually too tired to live is bored stiff with just watching movies or laying in bed and seizes on any moment when activity's possible as a break in the misery. This is the truth of my life and why I always dive for my Comfort Zone.

It's in my Comfort Zone that I'm able to do anything at all. Add extra challenges onto the logistics of trying to live in my body and chances are I'll wind up using up what little body energy I have in creating the setup or getting out the materials.

So maybe Comfort Zone is a problem like weight loss. Many people are a little over and could stand to lose a few pounds, but you really do not want to suggest that to an anorexic. They might push it to the point of death if you do. It's never a temptation to just do nothing, it's always an unpleasant frustration. I cannot keep the pace of the abled and I find my limits in unexpected and unhappy ways if I don't follow my intuition on what I can do right now, this day, this hour, this weather and what I ate and who said what to me online earlier.

Stress comes into it too. Stress isn't good for people in general, but most people need a certain amount of it to be happy, a comfortable pace. Some people actually thrive on a moderately high level of stress and excitement, depends on personality and metabolism and culture.

Fibromyalgia means that emotional stress, even something like reading the wrong news story at the wrong time when it gives me a shock, will knock me into total exhaustion and physical agony. Crippling pain washes over me. This will also blur my vision, wreck my memory to the point I sound like an Alzheimers patient, leave me forgetting my phone number or not finding something right in front of me. In that state I don't paint well even if I push myself hard and try to paint.

There were some kinds of work I could do in that state but all were left-brained rote activities. The entire 1980s were my "pain robot" years.

That said, I think there's something strange that goes on between attitude and confidence.

I'm continually surprised at how the level of confidence painters have is almost disconnected from their skills. It's not like the best painters beat themselves up more than beginners. It's more that some people are really happy with their own art and others not.

I am usually happy with my art even when it's flawed, because there'll be something about it that I like. I may want to redo it later but probably not by reworking on the same piece. I'll probably apply the critique later to some completely different subject, but if I'm not happy with something I am as likely to be wrong as when I'm thrilled with it.

But I have also got other challenges in life a lot heavier than whether a painting works or whether it's finite perfection. I strive to improve overall so that my worst come out pretty well and someone will like them. I reached a point of liking my own drawings very early in childhood after a long life study of one pet and from there just assumed I'd keep getting better at difficult subjects, but I approach them slowly. I also don't even do them until I've got all the tools I need to do it right sometimes.

But, back to the physical. When I paint, it makes me happy. Especially when I go right into my Comfort Zone and choose a subject with bright colors like a macaw or hummingbird or flower or fruit, or a cat, any cat, a landscape without any other people in it or signs of human habitation where I know I'm not going to get hassled by anyone and can amble through at my own pace without running into those abled hikers with their huge backpacks warbling about "It's only another mile or so" to the water. Better not be or I'm dead. I like to see the water right in the scene.

I like those moments with wildlife where sitting still long enough lets them relax and understand I'm not hunting them, so they wander out and show themselves close. Wild cats especially but most wildlife too. I didn't get to do it often but I have had some moments to remember and love documentaries.

What happened is that because I couldn't run and play as a little boy, I got very good at reading, writing and drawing, the things that were still fun when you sit still for a long time. I did and do lots of little drawings that can be finished before I'm too tired to do it well. I learn a lot and over the past few years have learned so much more than I ever expected, WC is tremendously stimulating.

I get decisive when I paint. A mark is there when I've done it. Removing marks in any medium takes a lot more time and effort than just taking it for what it is and moving on, dealing with it by changing what I do next. That's just a physical fact. Anything that makes it slower and harder to finish a painting means I'm less likely to even manage to do that painting, so my reworking paintings usually isn't cost effective.

I have seen great painters brag about throwing away 19 out of 20 paintings they do. This makes me cringe. I can't count the number of times I hated something I finished, but other people loved it, and then years later I found out why and that what I thought was my worst was actually my best because I'd leaped beyond myself and intuitively practiced a principle I didn't consciously understand at the time.

The thought of wasting that much effort is horrifying too, but on body energy I'm on a budget something like a single parent of five kids working a part time Wal-Mart job. All physical activity takes five times the body energy given my skeleton, that's a limit I had from birth. I took much longer learning to walk than other children and was extremely clumsy being cross eyed on top of it, the eye operation helped but didn't change all of it.

So if I had to cross the room to get more paper, I did so five times. If I have to get out a different box of pastels, I did it five times. If I set up the easel or stand at it, I did it for five times as long and my scoliosis kicks in. Between pain and spasms, I can get too excited and push my back to where I'm stuck with days of bed rest. I have to stop at the first twinge, so slight it doesn't even register as pain, or I will pay bitterly later on.

But maybe for someone passionate and physically vigorous, brushing off a huge piece of Kitty Wallis paper 20 times till they're emotionally satisfied isn't a big deal.

I am currently trying to settle in and rearrange my life to be able to paint more, paint better, paint larger someday. That's a slow process and a good deal of it is a matter of literally rearranging furniture with the help of home care workers. I manage to paint when I can't even take a bath without help, because having help in the bath means I have some energy left to paint the next day. Literally the actions involved in scrubbing my body are sit-ups my back won't tolerate. I can manage two to wash my hair and if it ever gets so bad I can't keep that up, I'll get them shaving my head because I dislike other people washing my hair.

I live on disability for a reason. I'm hoping to get back to painting for a living, or more realistically supplementing old age Social Security by painting on the side. If I wasn't disabled at all, I would have made a good living as a painter probably from the time I was 20 and started getting cash money for little pen and ink dragon drawings. I'd have had the energy to do enough of them and most of all, paint them bigger and colorful and get to enough conventions, do the full sheet starscape and nebula beyond craggy moonscape astronomicals too, live in the sci-fi fandom but drift toward fine art on the side.

It's also screamingly funny to me to look at different art markets like the museums-gallery fine art circuit, the sci-fi fantasy fandom, the graphic novels and murals style of modern art, and see that each one has its own expectations about subject and ideas and "originality" which usually means "Do some old familiar favorite really well and be good enough at this style we can tell it's you without the signature. Share what the dragon or water lilies or mountain goat means to you."

Some people here like tough critique and most of all prefer to see flaws pointed out, because they are tired of compliments and lean toward perfectionist, get disgusted if they feel something's wrong and can't put their finger on why. Or don't trust it if it looks good.

Others blossom under the support. WC excels at both, the critique guidelines here are just broad enough to make it very comfortable for both the tough-critique "exciting challenge" crowd or those that thrive on support and encouragement. I got a lot of encouragement as a kid because sitting still made me get way ahead of any healthy child. I had the time and boredom to do it.

So what works for me may not work for you. Or it may work well for you. Please don't throw away your paintings! Just sell them to other people who like them, they may be right, they sure are for themselves and it'll make them happy. Let it go and use the money to get more paper. Remember that your worst is still way beyond what a lot of people can do at all and they'll still love it as much - just as they do still love the one they bought a decade ago that's not as good as what you do now.

There are always better painters. It's open ended. If you're up in that range you're already so specialized in your own style that the others that great are doing things you'd never think of doing, and so there's something cool to learn, including what you'll invent tomorrow. Or what happens when some chemist creates a new pigment or manufacturer an entirely new medium. There is more to learn about painting even in one medium than any one artist could learn in a human lifetime or even a dozen lifetimes because all of us are also always inventing. Art is not a zero sum game.

I think some ideas, like ranking it best and worst, are bad when applied to it because it gets so subjective and holistic. Your personal taste is going to apply to all of it and so does that of your buyer or gift recipient. Your skill at communicating with those art viewers is only going to increase, though sadly physical illness, pain and injury can reduce it. But that can be worked around. Skill can compensate for lost capacities.

I might get more detailed again if I got prescription glasses. Or I might not because I'm coming to enjoy working loose and concise. It's all fun.

What's the point of this essay? You have to judge for yourself. It's real obvious to me now that yeah, I don't do things the way other people do. What's easy for you is nearly impossible for me, but some things that would be hard for you are stone easy for me. I've had one major still life painting planned for almost a decade now and may well paint it someday - little by little by little and without actually owning any of the objects. It involves an expensive wooden sideboard, a lot of lovely crystal and glass, a mirror and a beautiful white cat sound asleep in the middle of it. Which of these things is going to destroy all the others? Guess!

If I had that stuff I sure wouldn't pose the cat in the middle of it but I may get good enough at planning paintings and rendering those objects to put it together entirely by design, capture my Siamese in the right pose, work out the reflected colors on the white fur and remember the exact hue all of it gets in the mirror because the slightly greenish glass cools everything. It'd be a fun painting. It won't be watercolor even if it'd work in watercolor because Getting Older is not going to make me more capable of stretching a full sheet of watercolor paper. Its most likely going to be pastel on sanded paper. It won't be realism. It will be impressionism.

It's simultaneously going to wow with its beauty and shock you with the thought of all that broken glass a moment later, make you want to reach in and gently catch the pitcher, pick up the kitty fast, if I do it right you will have about a 50-50 chance of saving the situation provided you know cats and that cat trusts you like your cat does. I could remove Ari from a pile of breakables on a good day and I'd move the at-risk pitcher before removing him - in that direction in case he decides it's Rowdy Cat Play Time.

But that's the fun of it. I see that paintin gin my mind and slides of it in watercolor, in oils, in oil pastels, oil sticks, oils by painting knife, pastel realism, pastel impressionism, all different ways, exist where you can't see them. And someday I'll have the skills to do it. Then sketch. Then get to work on it about once or twice a year till it's finally done. Not something I can live on, but it will get done or I'll die first. And that's how my life is shaped.

Know yourself. Know what you do and what you don't and why. Stop beating yourself up. Neither you nor your art has to be perfect. Perfection only exists in finite unliving things and art that's too perfect isn't, because good art has and shows the imperfections in life. Compensate for your barriers and weaknesses, play to your strengths and do what's right for you, because that's also where your style comes from. Past a moderate level of skill, others who know you can tell it's yours before you sign it.

Goofing Off is Good Sometimes

January was a heck of a month. I ran into the wall of my limited body energy head first and hard, after over six months of running on empty. A couple of minor problems and one major inconvenience escalated it. The elevator went out in my building for three months, leaving me four flights of stairs every time I needed to go out for anything. The minor problems were my going out for necessities and then forgetting one of them because I was too sick and woozy by the time I got to the corner store.

One extra trip down the stairs too many right before Christmas and bang, my bad back, hip and leg decided to quit. I wound up with a full month of unwanted rest. Not pleasant relaxation. Painful grogginess, sleeping like my cat and stressing out because I had deadlines set up based on my usual pace of living and painting.

Two commissions were both overdue, both of them pieces I wanted to finish before Christmas. I got two out of three paintings done on one of them and the other one, just didn't even get started till that one was done.

I thought I had another month or two on the Sketchbook Project 2012 too. So I'd set it aside in favor of getting important things done, paid commissions that people expected versus a personal project. Went right to the wire on that one but got it done last night and mailed it this morning. It goes on tour in April, that wasn't the "get it mailed in by" deadline.

I'd also signed up for a puzzle painting challenge when I thought I'd have plenty of time to do it. Managed to get that done too. Net result, a lot of stress that may have made it even harder to pull out of the funk. Even San Francisco has winter weather that slows me down. Lesson learned.

The hardest part came during the pain days when I wasn't up to doing anything at all except reading, doing email and playing a familiar computer game badly. That was when the panic set in because I was starting to feel burned out. I didn't want to work on any of it. I didn't even feel like doing cat gestures and couldn't muster the emotional energy to force myself to do one.

Back in 1995 or so, I quit selling portraits in the French Quarter and by the time I left New Orleans, was so burned out on art that I didn't keep any of my supplies. I gave away my oils and pastels and a lot of my stuff to friends except for a few favorite things, most of them materials I didn't often sell that medium. I couldn't let go of the big Prismacolors set.

It took me years to recover from that burnout. I understand it now - it was the massive defeat of my pushing so hard to keep up and survive by doing art that I hadn't had any time to draw anything for fun. I couldn't afford to keep any artwork that came out well. If someone wanted it, I needed to pay the rent.

I didn't understand at the time that I wasn't playing with a full deck of physical abilities. I thought I was a lazy git. Instead, since all physical effort takes me five times the body energy, I was driving myself into the ground. At the end I had days nothing sold because people don't come up and buy street art from someone who's half asleep and racked with pain. They want to see energetic, enthusiastic artists who love what they do, not some bloke who might as well be saying "Got any spare change?" Besides, to strangers if someone's that sick they might be contagious.

I've looked back over that burnout many times to try to guard against it. I don't want to lose my love of art again. This article provided an interesting perspective on art and life: Why Money Won't Buy Happiness. Turns out, there are some unexpected psychological effects to working for the money.

My gut reaction, that it would be dangerous to fall into just doing it for the money, was spot on. Sometimes I have to back up and relax, either doing non-art things on a good day or doing art that has nothing to do with selling the piece. Today's illustration is a life gesture of my cat in Tombow brush pens. They're not archival. It's in my art journal. I'm not cutting that up either, that's personal. So it doesn't need to be permanent and forever.

It's just a cool little sketch of my cat that made me happy. Afterwards, I petted him and we had a non-art moment of affection too.

I need to stick to my personal boundaries on commissions. One at a time, no deadline. It's done when it's done. If it takes longer than expected, even years longer sometimes, the client gets a painting that's stunning gorgeous, years better than I would've done before because I'm always growing. That's even if it's an easy subject because I've got a lot of emotion in it - a portrait of a beautiful cat always gets personal for me.

Where it didn't was when I started worrying about making my Internet bill at the end of the month and relying on commissions to close the gap. That level of need is too much pressure to paint well.

So the thing to do is tighten my belt and start building up some savings again. When I've got even $100 in savings, that's enough that most minor setbacks won't jeopardize the Internet bill. I've had that for the past five years. I got through many computer crashes, cat veterinary visits and other irregular expenses just by having some savings and doing a "loan to self" that I'd pay back the following month if I got a little too extravagant at Blick.

I know I'm not the only one who does this to myself. I'm not even the only extreme that I've known. Too many friends will also drive themselves hard if they're behind, to get caught up, whether that's on time and energy or on finances. Relocation is hard for anyone. I did more than relocate though.

I pushed myself to get out and screen for the San Francisco Street Artists Program and in two and a half months, have not had one good day when I was able to go out and actually use my new license. There's a fifty fifty chance right now that I'll be renewing the license out of pocket and waiting for nicer weather. Though since today was nice, I'm starting to have a little hope that I can get out at least one day before I have to renew it.

All the time I packed and planned the move, I looked forward to getting out of the house on my own. I wanted to go out plein air sketching in Golden Gate Park. I wanted to visit the Asian art museum that's only a few blocks from where I live, or the museum of modern art, or, well, any of a good half a dozen good art museums here. San Francisco is a wonderful place.

I meant to get out on the bus and just roam, get off when I saw something beautiful and sketch it, then develop the sketches into good street paintings. Instead, I haven't even managed a scouting trip to see the artists on Fisherman's Wharf yet. Let alone get that day off just plein air painting in Golden Gate Park with no expectation of selling it or doing anything but filling my sketchbook with beauty.

People who diet go through this process. Grim self control and self discipline can only be sustained so far. If the elevator hadn't gone out, I might have done all those things and by now would have the money to renew the license for a year and just not worry about it. Maybe it's better to do that annual renewal during a good season when I can count on good days to go out.

This entire article is a cautionary tale.

If it stops being fun, take a deep breath. Stand back. Go outside. Bake yourself some cookies or go for a long walk. Read a good book or fry your brain out on a video game. Do whatever it is that just makes you happy when you're goofing off. Two things happen when you love your work so much that it's hard to tell work time from playtime.

1) There is the up side that most of the work time is so pleasant it can feel like you don't need to work for a living. This is real. I've experienced it.

2) The risk is that if you love it that much and spend that much time at it, you can burn out and forget to have any playtime at all. "Busman's holiday" activities are essential. So is plain old time off doing something different.

I have a few mediums set aside for just that sort of thing. They would sell, surely, but never have at any price worth the amount of time that goes into it. Detailed Celtic Knotwork drawings exquisitely shaded and colored in colored pencils or watercolor. Colored Pencils Realism is another good one for goofing off with. Last and most frequent, the maintenance activities that I keep up while I'm working on major projects most of the time.

I sign up for challenges in my art community, WetCanvas. There are several I enjoy, where photo references get posted by a volunteer and everyone does them his or her own way. I didn't have to do the Puzzle Painting piece. It wasn't for sale or for the street. It's a goofy little four inch pastel sketch on my sketchwall that doesn't make sense without its context. But now like everyone else who participated, I'm looking forward to seeing it seamed up with the 35 other pieces to make a complete mosaic picture. It's a game. It was fun. It wasn't even serious practice, though naturally I tried out a few techniques because I could do anything I wanted with it as long as I got it lined up right at the edges.

I considered doing a fisheye effect on it or some other distortion, just for fun. Didn't, but I might with another one sometime.

If I hadn't made the time to do that one, I would have been fried. I'd have felt like a little kid who spent a month looking forward to something only to get told it's bedtime, you can't have it, now it's too late.

That little kid, your inner child, is a real part of every artist or writer or creative person. Drive the kid too hard for adult reasons and he or she will get cranky and start drawing on the walls, or throw a work stoppage.

No one can keep up with every obligation. No one can say Yes to every interesting thing that comes down, every need or want, every fun thing. Sometimes life throws monkey wrenches into plans. That's when it's time to back up, calm down and find something that works to get back on an even keel.

I set my February goals ludicrously low. I've got two of them.

1) Enjoy my Art. No matter what I do during February, whether it's painting a new cat commission or sketching loony dinosaur cartoons or picking up another Puzzle Painting piece, if I enjoy doing it, it counts toward this goal. I keep getting silly cartoon ideas, so why not run with them? That's art too!

2) Save at least $20 a month starting this February, so that I don't feel the pinch this bad again. Yes, it took everything I had to make this move before I was ready to go. That was an emergency though and the emergency is over. Now it's time to start settling in and rebuild my life in the beautiful new place.

They fixed the elevator. I can go out again without spending days resting up from it. I've got Paratransit thanks to some stressful research, calling and paperwork. It's $2 each way to go out anywhere in the city, $4 total for a door to door outing as long as I plan it a day in advance. I might get my day in the park soon.

Anyway, that's also the reason for a month without posts in what I'd been keeping up as a blog with weekly updates. When things started going overboard to get necessary things done, all of my blogs fell off the wagon. I'm glad to be back and hope you're glad too. Hopefully I can keep up a little more frequently now.

But if I don't during February, now you know why. I need a real vacation and getting sick doesn't count as one!