"Playfulness... is the lightness we bring to an almost unbearable reality."
- Eric Maisel, The Power of Daily Practice (53)
Playfulness In My Daily Practice
I need more playfulness in my painting practice to remind myself to enjoy the process and encourage me to explore and experiment. When I add new materials or try out new techniques, I am playing a game to see what will happen next. What can I do when I don't know what I'm doing? Adding play into my paintings is how I remember to not take myself too seriously.
In today's notans, I played with cropping the original photo of my grandma in her backyard, feeding the chickens to fit within an 8x10 rectangle. I like the windows in this photos and the crowd of chickens felt very abstract to me. I made multiple thumbnails and I eventually realized that I couldn't give the chickens equal visual weight to my grandma. I left only one chicken in there and it was noticeably better.
For tomorrow, I am ready to work on a drawing.
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.