Change is Hard!

As you probably know, I'm in the midst of a huge life change.

After years of building a teaching business that took up an enormous amount of my time, energy and headspace, I've stepped away from it and committed myself fully to life as a painter.

I have lots of reasons for making this decision, but the biggest is very simple: I want to find out how far I can take my art.

Some time ago, I began to realise that teaching was getting in the way of that. 

Teaching takes creative energy. Every time I discover something and turn it into a lesson, some of that energy goes outwards.

Every time I answer a question, solve someone's problem, make a video explaining an idea, or work out how to articulate something I've learned intuitively, I'm taking something that began in my own creative process and handing it to somebody else.

For years, that's exactly what I wanted to do.

I loved helping other artists; I loved working out why something worked and finding a way to explain it; and I became very good at it.

But eventually I started wondering what would happen if I stopped. What if I kept all that energy for myself?

I sold my last course in December and, because I wasn't preparing for another Find Your Joy, I suddenly found myself with much more time. Over the last few months, I haven't had to write scripts  or record videos or plan marketing campaigns. I have simply had to make my work.  

I can follow an idea for days without having to think about how I might explain it.

I can experiment with techniques without needing to understand why they work.

I can make something strange - and leave it strange.

I have time to think, and time to look.

And almost immediately, my work started changing. It has deepened and become more "me" and it has shown me that I made the right decision. 

There's just one problem: I can't seem to stop teaching.

Not officially. I've definitely stopped doing that. It's more that the instinct is still strong.

I'll discover something in the studio and immediately think, "Oh, that would make a great video." Or someone will ask me a question on social media, and my brain starts constructing the answer. Or I'll have an insight about painting and within seconds I'm turning it into a pithy little lesson.

Apparently, after years of training myself to give everything away, stopping isn't quite as simple as deciding to stop, and that's made me think about change.

We talk about making big changes as though the difficult part is making the decision. Perhaps sometimes it is, but I'm discovering that there's another difficult bit afterwards.

You have to stop being the person who lived the old life.

There is so much comfort in doing what we've always done. The pathways are already there. We don't have to think about them.

For me, it would be incredibly easy to carry on sharing everything I'm learning. There are two reasons I can't do that.

The first is practical. Under UK law, because I'm closing my limited company, there are restrictions around continuing the same trade. The details are far too boring for a Sunday email, but essentially, teaching is off the table.

The second reason matters much more.

I'm starting to think that every time I answer someone's question about painting, I'm giving away a little piece of something I need for myself.

Every time I turn a discovery into a lesson, I stop simply experiencing that discovery as an artist.

And every time I start thinking about what would be useful to somebody else, I've stopped asking what might be useful to my work.

Right now, I don't want to do that. I want to keep some things unexplained; I want to follow ideas without knowing where they're going; and I want to have thoughts about painting that belong only to me.

I'm increasingly convinced that I need to hoard my creative energy like it's a superpower. Because it is my superpower.

I think every artist who teaches must encounter some version of this dilemma. If we're lucky, perhaps we find a balance where teaching feeds the work and the work feeds the teaching, but that balance often eluded me.

I became very focused on growing the business. I cared enormously about helping other artists develop their work. And because I loved doing it and was good at it, it kept expanding until there wasn't enough of me left for my own art.

So I'm not looking for balance anymore. For now, I want to swing the whole thing as far as possible in the opposite direction.

I want to know what happens if I give the paintings everything.

I've started calling this my selfish era, and I'm beginning to realise that deciding to enter it was the easy part ...

Now I have to learn how to live there.