Not long ago, a good and trusted friend of mine convinced me to try to produce some sort of art every day and to share, daily, whatever I made (no matter how I felt about it). It’s a popular exercise amongst artists, and one I have never understood or been on board with. Sharing progress kind of exacerbates the things I worry about when I work: they will have preconceived notions about what you’re doing if they see it before it’s finished, your system makes no sense, you’re weird, they are going to hate you or get bored with you (not your work, but YOU) before you finish.
But I did it (for a while – I justified bailing on the project a few weeks in because Christmas rolled around and made things difficult; thank you Jesus). But it was pretty fucking amazing. I was really surprised at what resonated with people. Things I NEVER would have shared normally often got a far more positive response than the things I shared that I felt “properly represented” me.
More than anything, a bunch of ideas seemed to sprout out of nowhere. One night, hard-pressed to draw something, I looked at a bottle and ended up with an image so vivid I have already rendered it three times and still don’t feel like I have gotten it right. I am going to continue with it until I do get it right. And that’s not the only idea that was incubated during those weeks.
As an egomaniac with a chronic procrastination problem, the pressure of a deadline (self-imposed or otherwise) has sometimes transformed my carbon into diamond. I have decided that I am going to start the exercise again, albeit in a slightly modified form. I am going to post art on a daily basis again, but it will either be some new, weird, sorry, stupid, ridiculous sketch or it will be progress on a previous drawing I want to finish. Or it might be weird shit I write on my art table after getting extremely frustrated because my hands won’t properly transcribe what my mind wants to say, but I’ll try to keep that nonsense to a minimum. All that being said, I think I probably have 2 hours of sketching left in me tonight, so I’m going to get to it.