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How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love – by Maria Popova This is a bit of a longer read, but lots of interesting ideas are presented. The video on this page is pretty good too – although it’s 16 minutes long, so if you don’t have time for that, I recommend just reading the article. Any artistic soul will be touched by something in this article, and likely several things. 

Did you know that if you say to yourself “Saturday after breakfast I’m going to go and paint.” you are way more likely to do it than if you just say, “I want to paint sometime this weekend.” Giving it a time and place in your imagination makes what is called an “Action Trigger”, and people tend to follow through on those. I just finished reading a fascinating book called, “Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard” by Chip & Dan Heath. I learned a lot about what motivates people to change. I recommend the book if you are curious about people’s behaviour. Lots of interesting studies with surprising results. I found a number of suggestions that I want to apply to myself too! Here’s a brief excerpt from the chapter ‘Rally the Herd’ – and I think it will make you smile. – “In ambiguous situations, we all look to others for cues about how to behave. Maybe you’ve had the experience of scanning the table frantically at a fancy dinner, trying to figure out which fork is for dessert. (If you haven’t had that experience, we hope you know your forks, because the rest of us copied you.)” – Painting Saturday after breakfast sounds good to me! How about you? 

It may seem like an oxymoron to you, the idea of creative restrictions, but it’s actually not. The imagination, to be at full power, seems to require some parameters or restrictions. For example: if I tell a class of art students to paint anything at all on their blank canvas, the results are not as interesting or dynamic as when some sort of guidelines are given. These restrictions can be as simple as: use only 2 colours, or express in paint the emotion of joy. These minimal parameters become a spark to the fuel of creativity. Of course too many restrictions are not good either. Like too much salt, they can spoil the creative stew too. What kind of restrictions spark your creative mode? 

Then there was the fellow who wanted to know if I would paint his wife nude. He was quite persistent, even though I had said no thank you a couple of times to this particular commission. “No”, he said, “but will you paint my wife nude?” Finally I said, “I think I’d be way to cold.” He didn’t get it. 

I currently have 4 paintings on the go, and I love working this way! It means that when I need a rest from one painting, an incubation period, I can move to the next and keep on painting. This method has been with me since I first started to learn to paint. At that time, I was working primarily in watercolour, and moving to the next painting helped me let each one dry before painting the next layer, and not overwork it. Today, I’m using a lot of different acrylic mediums that also require significant drying time. Having multiple paintings on the go is such a part of me that if it’s ever down to just 1 painting in progress, I will suddenly notice that I’m not going to the studio as frequently! How about you? Do you like having several painting on the go at once? 

There is something excellent to be said about being in the moment. Certainly for many folks, the creative mode is the best way to be fully alive and in the ‘now’. Hopefully we have learned something from the past, but not in a way that we are afraid of new adventures. Hopefully we look forward to the future, but not so much that we can’t appreciate the wonder we are surrounded with right now. All you really have to live is today – and there’s freedom in that thought! Hope yours is a glad life, one day at a time. 

“Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.” Samuel Johnson Some common effects of distance (perspective) applied to painting: 1. Edges soften 2. Less detail 3. Colour less intense and paler 4. A moving toward cooler colour 5. Objects appear smaller –  I think Samuel Johnson is right, and it’s a good thing! 

For a very short list, this feels pretty comprehensive to me. What do you think? “A Big Creative Yes” by Dan Goodwin.