I Want to Start Painting Again

Getting Back to Art

Before diving into art-making total time, I dabbled on and off. Mostly off. For decades. Getting back to fine art has been i hell of a journey.

In my early twenties, I painted and doodled, and kept fine art journals.  In Rockport, Massachusetts, while renting a converted chicken coop/cottage (below) for the summer with a friend, we filled journal pages and covered the ceiling with watercolors. We gushed out paintings with unfettered carelessness, and tore pages from sketchbooks to tape them up, all around us.

In photos from that summer, art is pinned up everywhere around us. Information technology's all a bit garish, but we had a great summertime just making things. We weren't concerned with how the art came out. Nosotros were busy with the sheer delight of artistic output, while surveying the opportunities and challenges of each new medium we played with.

A summer in Rockport, MA, circa 1980, in a converted chicken coop-cottage, working at a glass blowing shop, and making art every day.

Art Interrupted

Then, I stopped making art for a long fourth dimension. I worked a diversity of regular, not-art jobs, while wondering if one could really make a living in the arts. Everyone I consulted said no, at that place was no "real" task for artists, unless I wanted to be ane) a commercial illustrator, which required skills I didn't believe I was blessed with, or ii) an unproblematic school teacher, where I might accept time to paint a little during summer breaks.

Eventually, I got a degree in Liberal Arts, with a minor in Educational activity. Studio fine art classes were my favorite role of college, and making things with my easily again was a salve against the stress of finals & two jobs. (The encouragement I got from professors in the art department during those years was a grateful first, and it has stayed with me to this solar day.)

1980's sketchbook provender

Dust on the Art Supplies

I moved to California, and worked some other not-fine art task for a little more than a decade. My art supplies festered in the garage. Work was consuming, rewarding and and then very un-creative.

Just I was surrounded by some of the very top of the visionary cistron pool; painters, illustrators, designers and world-class thinkers. The proximity to that brain-trust was wonderful, and I didn't realize information technology then, but I was on soak-bicycle, watching, observing and taking subliminal notes.

Trying to become an artist: testing my plein air painting skills in Valencia, California (Photo: Nick Smirnoff)

Returning to Art

By the time I came back to art, with hopes to brand a living with it, I was out of practice, and utterly unsure of myself. Which media should I focus on? Did I call up how to draw? How do artists manage the business organisation end of fine art these days?

I had no thought where to start, and I was overwhelmed to be attempting an art career then belatedly in life.

I researched in earnest, and attended art festivals and gallery exhibits. I subscribed to art trades, read books, joined art associations, wrote to my art professors for advise. I cold-chosen local artists to ask if I could buy them dejeuner and quiz them.

I took workshops and filled journals with notes. I printed business concern cards, started blogging and adumbral a seasoned art festival exhibitor as her "roadie" to observe the effort and supplies required to nowadays like a pro.

There was and then much to learn, and that was just the logistics; the marketing, venues, sales and concern end of the art world. I still had to make the art.

Learning to talk to art patrons about my work at an early art festival (you can't see it, only my knees were quaking) Gulp.

Once an Creative person, Ever an Artist

When it came to greasing the gears of my fine art-making brain, everyone told me – unanimously –  that the best thing to do was draw and paint, all the time.

So, when I finally picked upward my drawing pencils and paint brushes – I was amazed – after just a week or 2 – at how much I had learned while I was away from art-making. I withal had [have] a whole continent of exercise to hike over, merely once I started making once more, I was floored. I could communicate, artistically, some of the accumulated observations I'd made over the previous decade.  Somehow, I got amend with age, from simply observing.

Is whatsoever of this familiar to you? Have you taken a big, long hiatus from art? Are yous wondering how to get back in the fine art-making swimming, to swim around a trivial?  Yes?  Oh good, because this rambling, convoluted story is for you. Yeah you . Please proceed reading…

Getting back to fine art: shoring myself up with instructional books, preliminary sketches, and photos of paintings I dear (British watercolor creative person Lucy Willis).

This Art Conversation is for Yous

Fifty-fifty though you might not have touched a brush for a few dog years – it doesn't thing. Trust me.

Your innate, Find-the-Loveliness-Radar for dappled sunlight across a table, reflections of a cityscape in a puddle, or the softened edges in a veil of littoral fog – has been hard at work all this time. Y'all are a Noticer. And you know, deep down, that this is the truth.

Yous've been observing, and stacking details virtually color and shape and nuance from the first twenty-four hours you opened your eyes. You lot've been taking notes and stashing them in your brain-attic, even though you haven't made a thing (besides those post-it note doodles while talking on the phone). In one case an creative person's eye, ever an creative person'south heart. Y'all have a National Treasury of observations in your brain trust.

Productivity over Perfection

Artistic Conviction

Now, you simply accept to allow the observations you've collected out of the cranium. Offset slow, and small. Take a class, or just a weekend workshop. Sign up for a short art workshop online and put information technology on the calendar in ink so you'll end it. Follow artists on Instagram. Join fine art groups online so you'll have visitor and advice on the start hike upwards the hill to return to your love of art.

Buy a book about the kind of art you desire to make. Listen to a podcast nearly making art, and spotter some youtube videos of artists doing demos to get your fine art game on.

Don't filibuster any longer. It's fourth dimension to choice up a artistic tool and make something. Your brain is fit to burst with all the imagery you've been collecting. Really, I'm non kidding. Stop reading this, and go get a sketch pad. Kick your inner critic to the curb, and just make something. And by and large, have a lot of fun. 🙂 I'm rooting for you, and I believe with my whole eye that You've Got This.

Thanks for your visit, and I'll run into you in the next post –

Belinda

Art Quote

Happiness is the consequence of personal try. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the globe looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once yous have achieved a state of happiness, you must never get lax well-nigh maintaining it. You must make a mighty try to keep swimming upwardly into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Entry Window 12 x half-dozen Watercolor (sold)

banksshapithe.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.belindadelpesco.com/getting-back-to-art.html/

Share this post