A painting a day has jump started march for me. In five days I have completed (ish) five paintings. I have earned a ton about my paints and I’m learning more about color. It’s forcing me to paint on nights where normally I’d go to bed at 7PM. (Not from sadness but from actually moving tables all day at work. : )
However, there is a sort of awkward side of it as well. Paintings are not a one-a-day endeavor. At least for me they aren’t. Paintings take time and thought. They aren’t hurried. They are the opposite of hurried. Painting a day, however, is hurried. It creates a bit of internal stress. I can feel myself yelling, “You don’t have time to think about this. Just put a damn color down.” I’m not spending the necessary time in the thumbnail and sketching stage. (There is no thumbnail or sketching phase for a painting a day.) With limited time, it’s just all energy into painting.
So again, there are 300 reasons why this is PERFECT for me...for the short term. For March. And then I need to take what I’ve learned and slow down. Be thoughtful.
The other awkward part of it is that even when I’m focusing on a painting, not all paintings come out. I have hundreds of painting in my studio that will never make it to the walls of this blog because they aren’t good enough. With a painting a day, I don’t have that luxury to pick and choose. Maybe if I created 5 paintings a day, I would like one enough to post...but that luxury is gone when you’re just trying to meet a daily check mark.
Mar 5, 2014, 9:13pm