Where 2023 was about making more pictures, 2024 is about becoming the person who makes more pictures.
That person blocks time on the weekly calendar, shows up at the designated time and gets to work. Often enough I have to tell myself not to second guess whether this is what I should be doing. Just do it. We can review how it went later.
A huge benefit from time blocking is that I’m finally figuring out how much time things actually take — it’s 2 to 3 times what I think. Gobsmacked by the finiteness of time, I’m forced to constantly reassess my to-do list. Does doing this task help me become the kind of person who makes more pictures?
I have a plan. But, once in the studio I’m just doing the next right thing. This week as I was making textures and drawing with the brayer — play naturally took over. I don’t know how to describe it more accurately than that.
Robert Henri said, “The object is not to make art. It’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”
That makes sense to me.
Henri also says, “Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone.
Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.”
That I’m still taking on faith.
Working larger — 24” x 18” A brayer and Daniel Smith’s water-soluble oil paint.
A closer look: January value studies.
music: Mister Lucky by Jerry Reed
Early in the month, film clips and Netflix thumbnails were the subjects that dominated. Later, more studies from photographs — including two by Ralph Crane of Life Magazine that he shot in 1960 of the chimponaut program at Holloman Air Force Base.
Throughout, you will find compositions by Kathe Kollwitz, Ricardo Ales, Steve Brodner, Eagon Schiele, William Kentridge, Fred Otnes, and David Lupton. As well as others for which regrettably I’ve lost the artists’ names.
Accompanying these value studies are now brief notes about the composition — whether mass, line/texture or form dominant; the complexity of the matrix; the characterization of the major and minor keys. The mood and emotion they convey.
I look forward to doing these each morning. They are the kind of thing that a person who makes more pictures would get out of bed for.
