Today we have a crew here working on taking out two of the showers in our house so that they can be repaired and replaced. Amidst pounding upstairs (master bathroom) and downstairs (basement bathroom) it’s pretty distracting and noisy.
Still I am practicing
Perseverance
through all of the distractions.
I’ve already completed my painting for the day (day 3 of 100!) and am soon going to take a walk before the rain starts. In fact I think that I’ll save what I’ve written here, take my walk and finish this post after the rain starts. See you later…
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow.”
―
I’m back from a cool windy walk with leaves flying all around me. It definitely feels like fall today. I took my camera along on my walk and after making just a few photos the battery died. Darn, I forgot to check the battery level before I left.
What do you create when you come up empty?
I want to talk a bit more about today’s painting. When I sat down and looked at the blank sheet of paper in front of me this morning, I had no idea what I was going to paint. So I waited until an idea came. It took staring at the blank white paper for quite awhile before any idea surfaced.
I picked up my Fresh Paint book and leafed through some of the photos of paintings in it. Finally I decided that I wanted to cover the sheet with color. That was it—I had no idea what I would do after covering the sheet with color. I decided to trust the process. Scanning my palette of watercolor paint, I waited until my attention settled on a color.
“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”
― The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle
Then I picked up my widest brush and dipped it into the water and then into my favorite green color. As a made my first stroke across the paper, the bristles of the brush, not fully saturated with paint made interesting horizontal lines. I liked those lines so I decided to make more. As I re-filled my brush with water and paint and made my second brush stroke across the paper, I noticed that I had too much water on the brush to get the uneven lines. Instead I was drawing a solid line of color. Oh well. Let’s see what happens next.
I continued to brush across the paper, sometimes with a drier brush, sometimes wetter. When I finished, with the green I paused and looked at the paper. I liked the uneven lines of soft color that I had created. But I had no idea what to paint next. So I paused and simply looked at my paints. I waited until I settled on the next color to use. As I began applying the new color I started to see suggestions of flowers on the paper.
So I went with that and continued to create rough areas of flower-like color. Then I decided to add hints of leaves and chose a different green to use.
Improvisational Art
The development of this painting was a kind of improvisational dance, listening to my inner self, responding to what was happening, and going with the flow of creativity that emerged.
The creative process doesn’t always work this way. Sometimes it’s like slogging through knee-deep mud and the end result is quite disappointing. That is also a part of the creative process. Sometimes ideas don’t come or the ideas I have don’t turn out to be interesting to me. But when I show up every day, sometimes magic happens. It is those moments of magic that make the slogging through mud worthwhile.
It’s easy to get discouraged and stop. Heck, I still don’t know whether I will meet my goal of creating 100 paintings in 100 days (more or less — I may miss a day or two now and then but so long as I continue until I get to 100 paintings, I will consider this experiment a success). But I’m going to continue to persevere and see what happens. The worst that can happen is that I quit. I’m willing to risk that.
How about you?
What creative project is calling you? When was the last time you worked on it? Is it time to cultivate perseverance in your creative life?
May you walk in beauty.
Photos from my walk today (before my camera battery died)
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