If you only follow one piece of advice, make it this!
Instagram threw me a bone this week, with a piece of wisdom from painter Chantal Joffe coming across my feed.
In the clip, Chantal was asked for advice for young artists and she said:
Even when you feel like you can’t, try to paint because only through the act of making something do you ever have the thoughts. When you’re not painting, you can’t think ... It’s through the act of doing it that you do the thinking.
I've often noticed this. I'll be feeling totally uninspired and even bored with my work. Maybe I have no idea what to work on because everything seems 'off' somehow. But if I get started anyway, ideas start to come. I get an urge to pick up yellow paint or smudge a line of charcoal, and then I like what happens so I start to do more of it. Or I don't like what happens so I change it.
Either way, I'm now engaged in the act of creating again.
It may sound a little crazy to say "When you’re not painting, you can’t think," because actually we spend a lot of our time thinking too much. We think about why we feel stuck. Or we try to imagine what our finished work is going to look like. Or we stress that we can't get any sense at all of what we want to make.
But all of that isn't the kind of thinking Chantal means - that's ruminating and worrying. She's talking about clear creative thinking. The kind of thinking that feels like a direct channel to something larger than yourself. And if you are a painter, that kind of thinking only comes when you are painting.ently.
I experienced that recently. I've been looking at a particular childhood photograph for weeks. I wanted to paint it but I didn't know how. I had fallen into the trap of trying to see the end before I had even got started... and so I delayed and stalled and avoided.
But, because I've been at this a long tine now, I quickly noticed what was happening, pulled on my big girl pants and started making a charcoal drawing outlining the figures. "Just get an initial drawing down" I told myself "and then you'll feel much better."
This is the initial outline I drew.
Usually, my outlines are just a starting point. They are covered over many times in paint and mixed media and I draw and redraw the figures numerous times. But there was something about these outlines that just spoke to me so powerfully. The simple shapes seemed to already carry so much.
This led me to work in a very different way to the way I normally work. i went slowly and methodically, adding to the piece minimally each time I came into my studio, and avoiding paint altogether. I built the drawing up through charcoal and soft pastel and graphite and I stopped when I felt I was in danger of telling too much of the story.
It turns out that this piece wanted to be a drawing rather than a painting, but that clarity of thought only came because I forced myself to get started.
So the next time you are stuck because you can't see the end, remind yourself that you can't ruminate your way to a painting. You can only paint your way there and there's no better time to start than now :)
(If you want to see this drawing develop, stay tuned for my next Youtube video as I recorded some of the process and my thoughts as I went along).