me and travis were talking and thought it might be interesting to have a post where we talk about our work habits...how we manage our time, what we do with our time. so i'll start it off:
on a day of work if i get home at 4 i try to paint 3 hours that day and any later 2 hours. i'm tired as hell when i get home so i always first brew a cup of tea and that pumps me up. on the weekends i usually paint 7-8 hours a day but some days i go to the city to do whatever...but on those days i try to stop by the art store in chinatown.
in the summer i go crazy and paint usually 7-8 hours every single day but then usually one day i'll end up havin to do something and i'll paint like 2 hours. i barely ride the train or leave my neighborhood...it's so great.
after a day of painting all day it feels good to go for a run or play video games.
while i paint i usually have a movie on or a tv show or an audio book or some music. when i am in the decision making process of a painting, like the pre sketches or whatever i need silence. but as you know my stuff has a lot of tedious shit in it and to get through that it really helps to have something entertaining on in the background. right now i'm going through the show Mad Men and it's sweet.
I don't usually write out ideas like travis does although i really think i might now that i'm playing around more with paint. i usually do a lot of pre drawing in my sketch book and then i put like 10 layers of wet acrylic down (using a hairdryer to dry each layer) and then draw a little bit and then i start tapping parts off and getting the layers on. i usually just think up techniques based on what the painting needs at that moment and then just roll with it. but i'd like to have it more planned out in the future...
so that's it.
a day where i don't paint or do something creative or related to painting i feel like it's wasted and i get even a little depressed or angry...
tell me what you guys do
i'm real curious
b
3 comments:
ahhh!
bradner you work hard!!!
heres my gig...
mol and i now work 2 days on 2 days off so when im at the gallery i try to do something art based if i get a chance, lately (this week) i have not.
so, some of my most fruitful times have started out at dunkin donuts first (as julie cameron advises) writing out the bullshit, anything for 3 pages, kinda like taking a poo. then i have a book that, when i have an idea for a series i write the title at the top of the page then riff out specifics.
so one page will say "clay figure"
or "what does a travis pickard abstract look like"
then i have like 20 pages going, and when i come back to d and d, i flip through and get back into the vision of that series for a moment and write another idea.
lately i have been mentally connecting them all.
my new trajectory is the "next" series. which is trying to draw my intentions together into my own kinda uber art. what lies beneath my need to make these ideas come forth? what do i want to make?
big questions for me....
i have always followed the muse in a certain sense and i have learned alot from it. i dont know if i would tell someone that they have to find their specific way... ive learned so much on the path of flow...
the thing that has been most important with that in mind is that i showed up for the daily lesson. that was the banks of the river in that sense.
more to come....
Missed this post the first time around...
I am more of a sporadic painter than I wish I was. My vision is to make it a daily activity but sometimes days or weeks pass without any painting. I think this is because I divide my attention between a variety of pursuits (music, full-time work, romance, etc.)
When I do paint, though, it is often very focused and I have meditated on the piece while I'm away from it quite a bit. Sometimes I work on 3 or 4 paintings at once. I usually listen to music constantly when I paint, however I'm so absorbed in what I'm doing that if the music stops sometimes I don't notice for a while. I have Mondays and Tuesdays off, that's when I tend to paint the most, also weekend nights. Like Bradner, when I miss a "painting date" with myself, I feel like I've wasted my time away that day.
Like Travis, I like to write about my paintings, but instead of preceding the work it's more a process of reflection. I often don't really know "what" I'm painting, other than a loose idea of how I want it to "feel" and how I'm going to achieve that graphically. I paint very much as a designer, often messing up a surface on purpose so I can do problem-solving and work it back into balance with the feeling I want it to convey.
After I finish a piece, I often have to recover for a while, like half a day maybe, and decide whether it's good, and whether I've achieved what I wanted to. So my output is not that great,and often I sit on a piece a while before I show it, but I've developed a rapport with it and I really know it inside and out, as far as discussing it with someone goes.
Andrea (Eckert) taught me some great lessons about spontaneity and not getting too obsessed with a piece. And I really liked the passage in that William V. Dunning book Travis let me borrow, about painting after you've tired out your analytical mind. Sometimes I paint late and fall asleep not really knowing what I've painted. I don't really "see" it until the next morning.
awesome posts
i was talking with kellie the other day about this subject ...since im getting married saturday, i cant paint right now. but i can literally feel the excitement building for next time and the ideas...
maybe the momentum of go go go is helpful if you want to get a whole bunch of a certain something done, but its hard to turn a corner going that fast, so with a little time buffer, it feels easier to take a new direction in my work.
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