How to find a breakthrough in your art

This week I've been working on a new class for my membership community. 

It's all about what I call 'adventurous painting.' I'm not sure if I coined this term and I don't think it's brilliant, but it does capture something quite important I think.

In creativity, I think we can be completers or adventurers. The completer wants to get things done. She feels that the goal of art is to finish paintings, and that failure is to be avoided if at all possible. This can lead to come success - completers can make a lot of art and - if they perfect their craft and find an audience - they can even sell it. There's a sense of accomplishment in that and some artists are happy to always be completers.

Then there are the adventurers. We are less interested in finishing paintings, and more interested in exploration. We want to go to places we haven't seen before and we hope to make things others haven't seen before. This doesn't mean we're skilled at it. or even that we ever succeed. It just means we are driven by the idea of learning something new. Our sense of accomplishment comes when we discover something - maybe a new colour, or a way of making marks, or even a whole new process.

"Adventurous painting" means to embark on each painting as an adventure, with no set destination in mind. It means to take risks and then more risks. It means to do things even though they night not work - in fact it means to do things because they might not work.

I think most artist are natural adventurers, but I think many of us become conditioned to act like completers. We've spent our whole lives learning that productivity is all-important, so we bring that into our art practice.

The problem is that a drive for productivity kills creation. When we see completion as the goal we work safely and carefully. When we strive to make a finished thing, we make safe things. This is because we are squashing down our natural adventurer spirit, which needs freedom to explore and play and find things out.

Recently I fell into this trap, as I do from time to time. For me, it looks like this: I start exploring ideas in sketchbooks or on paper and then I find the seed of something. Instead of gently nurturing that seed, I try to force it. It's as if I'm shouting "GROW!" while pouring buckets of water and fertiliser on it. Of course, the poor little thing withers and dies for lack of light.

We can kill our seeds this way. But we can also make a different mistake - we can over-nurture some seeds. We can treat them too carefully - as if they are rare and precious - and this doesn't allow them to grow strong enough to survive on their own.

Both mistakes arise from the completer mindset. We've had a good idea, now it's time to turn it into something. 

When this happens to me, I have to take a step back and remind myself to find my inner adventurer. That's what I did this week. 
You might remember a series of self portraits I made last year.

After a few months of working on them, I lost interest and the idea died.

I decided it was just one of those tangents we sometimes go on and i went back to my abstract paintings.

But I still felt a little bit lost, even in that familiar territory. I made a series called Pieces of Me, which I enjoyed, but then the energy went out of that idea and once again I was stuck. 

I considered going back to the portraits, but I felt no stirring of excitement about them. Until last week when I started filming the next Art Tribe class and decided our focus would be adventurous painting.

I filmed an abstract demo, and the decided to also film something figurative. A self-portrait is always the easiest option because the model is always available, so I positioned a mirror next to my painting wall, chose some unusual (for me) colours, selected a variety of media, and started to explore.

The result, made in just half an hour, is far more compelling than any of the portraits I made last year.

This one has verve and vigour and energy. I love the paint effects and the contrast between the different paint applications.

I love the wiry ink lines and the vibrant dashes of flourescent orange.

There are thing I would like to change, but I won't touch this one. There's a danger of getting too precious and stripping the life from it. Instead, I will list out the things I liked and then start again on another one, letting those ideas lead the way

I always know I'm onto something when the idea flood gates open. Images, words, and concepts start to flood in. I start to envision sizes and substrates and multiple different ways to tackle the subject. I also get a very clear sense of the meaning behind what I want to do, which adds weight to it, but also helps offer a sense of direction and purpose.

But what's important at this stage is to not try to pin the ideas down by defining what the paintings will look like. I don't know if they will all be self-portraits; I don't know if they will feature the figure or just the face, or something else; I don't know what combination of media I will use.

All that is to be explored - in the spirit of adventure!