Routine, Discipline and the art of being an artist

Something came up recently and I've been thinking about it: this notion of discipline and the value of either taking time off after you produce a body of work or pushing on, and leveraging that energy into the next body of work.

I believe - strongly - in work. I think the cultural myth of artist as dilettante is the opposite of what's required to produce good work. I think good work comes when you paint every day. It's not glamorous or exciting. It's lonely. Sometimes it's tedious, sometimes it's amazing but just like any work, it happens daily.

Here's a great article, one of my favorites, because it discusses Chris Ofili and a number of other well-known artists in the context of their discipline. They all go to their studios and paint every day. It's what works.

Click here to read Wake Up. Wash Face. Do Routine. Now Paint. by Michael Kimmelman, May 5, 2005, New York Times.

Comments

loriann signori said…
You are sooooooo right Lisa. Daily work, in a schedule, is what works for me too. Never wait for inspiration, through hard work she visits over and over again. Cheers!
November 1, 2010 at 2:00 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My favorite love poem - West Wind 2 by Mary Oliver

Image
for Dan on Valentine's Day West Wind 2 by Mary Oliver You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and your heart's little intelligence, and listen to  me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a  dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks --- when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming---then row, row for your life toward it. Still Waters. ©2010. Lisa McShane.
Read more

My favorite art inventory system

Image
Over the past couple of years I've looked at and played with a lot of computer programs for keeping track of artwork. Here are past blog posts on the subject: Art Inventory Systems, here's what I've tried and then this Update on Art Inventory Systems Alyson Stanfield has also written about this riveting subject on her great blog here . I come to these systems with built-in bias. I prefer a FileMaker based system to an Access based system because I think it's a more powerful and smoother software to use. I'd worked for a nonprofit that used Filemaker and it's what I know. I also prefer a system without goofy graphics. I'm an artist. I care how things look. If I open up software every couple of days I would like it to be clean and simple and not ugly. But computers evolve and the next direction is to the cloud. That is a system where software doesn't live on your computer but you access it via the internet. I operate on 3 devices: my iMac in my
Read more

#artinthetimeofcorona

Image
Tenino: Flooded River; Dalles at Dusk , 2020, Oil on Linen, 24" x 60". Shown here with Andrew Vallee sculptures. Hey check out this great blog article from Metropolitan Frame! It's an interview of me and where things are at with my work, given the virus. Metropolitan Frame is a custom frame shop in Minneapolis, Minnesota that produces most of the frames I use these days, including the one above. Their work is flawless and fits my work well. Click here for the article, #artinthetimeofcorona
Read more