Take a smaller step.

I can’t say how many times this has been my advice for people.

The big steps are usually impossible!

Small steps are the only way.

And yet I keep getting SO tripped up in my feelings about how impossible the big steps feel and how insignificant the little steps feel. It’s a big one to work with!

This year one of the things I am doing is exploring how to BE the artist that I AM. It felt important to me to do this without pressure, so I am mostly making art in sketchbooks. In December I went through my art supplies and pulled out all of the sketchbooks with empty pages and made a pile of them so fill up this year.

Plus I am making more art in my regular journals.

But, this voice inside kept saying… at some point the art needs to come out of books.

But OMG that stirs up all of the monsters. Not about making art on paper.. I have plenty of good art paper to burn through before the “Oh but good art paper is so expensive we can’t just keep buying it” monsters enter the chat… it’s about "but what comes next?"... there is only so much art I can put on my own wall, so this is, indirectly but directly enough to stir the monsters, a step towards showing and/or selling art.

Then, I was clearing out a drawer in my kitchen and found a little stacks of watercolour squares I had cut out, maybe 6”. Not perfect squares by any means. I thought.. this is a good little step! I put the squares on my table. 

Then, today, I was crabby, distracted, tired, hungry, and not getting much done.

So I turned on some music and got out my paints and just started playing.

OMG.

FREEDOM.

The big step of making art that has meaning or purpose or is being shown somewhere is TOO BIG.

This tiny step of covering these imperfect little squares with random blobs of paint is so freeing.

And who knows where it could lead?

I think we all put the cart before the horse in so many ways all the time.

I know I do. This little step today felt like putting the horse before the cart for once and then the horse turned into a unicorn who can take me anywhere.

UPDATE: I wrote this a few days ago and have been living with the partially painted squares on my desk.

The ideas are coalescing, germinating, merging together to form "super ideas".

When I first thought about about... what does it look like to BE the artist that I AM... I started with what it looks like for me. How it feels. What the routines and systems of it are. What I should DO to BE the artist that I AM.

But now, with these imperfect little squares on my desk, I am starting to to see what it LOOK LIKE outside of me and it actually feels like fireworks exploding in my chest.

More to come!

(But slowly)

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