Another Kind of Workout :: The Daily Painting Exercise.

Painting, or drawing, or doing any kind of art, is nothing like riding a bike. You can’t just get back on and start pedaling after an absence and expect to be very steady. Realist drawing (and by extension painting) is a mental exercise as much as it is anything else, and if you let your practice slip, well, you might not be back at square one but you’re gonna lose ground, ground that you probably fought hard to gain in the first place. Come to think of it, it’s an awful lot like losing focus on fitness practice. Huh.

Unfortunately at this point I am not a full-time artist (though I’m very grateful for my job, believe me!) so between work, home life, social life, and throw in some bad leisure habits, as well as spending some time developing some GOOD habits with regards to nutrition and exercise (totally worth it) and other things that always get in the way I have let my painting slip. I’m still producing good work, but not as good as I could be producing and certainly not as prodigiously as I have been.

The Daily Paint

A few years ago when I was at the Oil Painters of America show in Coeur d’Alene ID I asked Neil Patterson for a little advice on how to get better as a painter. He advised me to get a 9×12 canvas, set a timer 15 minutes, select a simple subject matter (still life, he meant) and paint. When the buzzer goes off, put the brush down. And he told me to do this every day, and to date the canvas so I can gauge my progress over the course of a week, a month, a year. Well I did for about two months until [see paragraph above] but I could tell even in that short period I DID get a lot better.  I hadn’t been thinking about this but this morning all of a sudden I woke up and remembered this simple little exercise. I saw that I had two hours before I had to be to work so I headed upstairs to my studio, grabbing the brightest thing I could see out of the kitchen along the way, and got busy with this:

Lemon Yellow, 6" x 8" Oil.

Just a lemon, sassy and shiny and flourish-ey and reflect-ey on the black lacquer finish taboret. So much more satisfying than hitting my beloved snooze button “one last time”.  And that’s saying something.

What are things you do that take consistent practice, whether it’s fitness, sports, art, music, hobby or work related? What gets you off track and more importantly, what gets you back on?

Advertisement