Growing Things
This Substack is about the size of a Cashew nut now, just starting to develop fingernails and little sparks where something cerebral will develop further along the road. I’ve been thinking about steadiness and progress through small daily actions.
It’s almost a year since I started to work through Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artists way’, a handbook about creative practice as a daily habit and all the ways a person might stall or dodge or trick themselves out of creative action. It’s a kind of map out of your own (possibly entrenched) procrastination.
I write ‘morning pages’ every morning now, even when they feel like an annoyance (the ‘no matter what’ approach is part of the point) and now, most days I draw or paint in the evenings after work, going to bed when I find myself falling asleep over a poised pencil. Even a poor drawing is better than no drawing. Daily habits take root.
Uninvited Langoustine
I have wanted to draw, paint, write and make things full time for a living since forever. I have a brutal inner voice who churns on and ON at me about not yet blossoming into a full time artist. I’m sure, this is the stuff ulcers are made of…
This crustacean self is a real black and white thinker. Always completely blind to any progress I make and in denial about the importance of learning and being a beginner at things in order to develop (a process which includes failing if you’re doing it right). Though much less desirable, the crustacean is a daily habit too.
Four months into this Substack and I am at a growing pain between monochrome and colour - trying to move away from image making in only black and white. I feel I need to ‘begin’ again with colour (although in reality I am not starting from complete zero) and so a little ennui, insouciance and fatigue is stinking up the place as I try things and fail a bit (which always feels very uncomfortable) en route to good discoveries. The ulcer-inducing crab has found a loud hailer.
I have to remind myself that I am at the present creative crossroads because of the work I have been doing to grow and develop my practice, the healthy habits I have been cultivating. Being where I am in itself is progress. I hang on to this idea like a Rosary while the crustacean spouts off, like Regan McNeil.
Look down at your feet, keep walking.
Ulcer-crustacean will never leave, I know this. Nor will it change its mind. At times it manages to shout above everything else in my brain cavity. The quiet wholehearted and daily act of filling sketchbooks, page by page is an act of resistance. One powerful habit being established to counter the other.
In a celebration - or maybe an ante-upping act, aimed at the demon crustacean (I’m coming for you, you beshelled bastard) - through May this year, I am going to show you my daily creative work outs...
Here’s a little taster: sketchbook pages from Paris last summer…
See you back here shortly x
Can’t wait? Join me here
Updates for May Challenge here and here and most recently… HERE
🦀 🦞 🦀 🦞 🦀 🦞
Hahahahaha! Thank you…
Yes to stickers, I definitely need to hang onto the message… And YES, Paris isn’t Paris without you, (Cherie!) x
I love it! “I’m coming for you, you beshselled bastard!” Make a sticker out of it!! Also I spy a sneaky ME in the sketches from Paris! 😍