"Seriousness is a measure of your devotion to living your life purposes."
-Eric Maisel, The Power of Daily Practice (51)
Taking Your Practice Seriously
Taking my practice seriously means that I take ownership over how I spend my time in my life. Instead of allowing outside influences to determine how I spend my time, I choose to say that I matter and how I live my life matters and therefore, my daily painting practice matters. I must do my practice to feel like I am living my life.
I suspect that I bring too much seriousness into my daily practice. I learned at a young age to be responsible, to take things seriously. I am comfortable with putting my nose to the grindstone and being serious about completing my work.
Now I need to balance my seriousness with playfulness and curiosity. I want my practice to be enjoyable and satisfying. I look forward to add something new or unusual into my strictly defined painting practice. I want to make space for the unexpected. I want to feel safe exploring my curiosity.
For today's practice, I experimented with using Prismacolor markers to add 4 values to my notans.I also made the notans bigger so I draw the shapes more easily. I got better at identifying and simplifying the shapes. However, I feel like the overall design of the picture became less interesting, less exciting to me as a painting. I realize that much of my excitement in painting comes from painting the details rather than making a good composition. I need to look for better ways to structure my paintings instead of getting sucked into details right away.
As part of #20For20ArtChallenge2022, I am reading from The Power of Daily Practice: How Creative and Performing Artists (and Everyone Else) Can Finally Meet Their Goals by Eric Maisel, PhD. Part I of the book covers 20 Elements of Practice. In this blog post series 20For20, I write about one Element every day and reflect on how to incorporate the Element into my daily painting practice.