Making a Good Start

My art business has grown substantially in the last year and half. I’ve taken on this whole live painting phenomenon, and I’ve started selling bigger pieces. I’ve done more commissioned work than I’d ever dreamed. It’s good. I’ve got no complaints.

What I do have is a little nagging feeling. The kind that tells me its time to get back to my roots, by base, the very thing that got me going in the first place. The thing that if I wonder too far from, I might lose my footing all together. I’m talking about daily painting of course.

Doing a (usually) small painting every day for an entire month has continually allowed me to gather ideas, explore techniques, grow an audience, and persevere in what is occasionally quite painful. Hemingway once said something about writing being easy, all you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. Some days painting feels exactly like bleeding. Or perpetually banging one’s head on the wall. Other days it feels more like someone else were painting and they just happened to have inhabited my unworthy hands. Images appear effortlessly. Colors harmonize. Those days are worth the prior blood baths. And nearly all of those days come as a result of a daily ritual. A daily painting.

Therefore on January 1st I’m going to, once again, take on the thirty in thirty challenge. And you can too. No really. Join me.

My idea this time around is for all of my 30 paintings to reference poetry. If you’ve got a favorite poem, please let me know in the comments.

To get myself going I’ve made a list of potential subjects for this upcoming series. It’s an ever growing list, but writing it down and sharing it with others makes it less fanciful, more possible. I might not get to any of these but the list gives me a direction even if I end up going somewhere else entirely.

So. I guess I’ll see you next year!