A couple thoughts on why Instagram has become my new favorite way to share my art with the world.

Yesterday I asked a small question but it got a big answer. It kind of took me by surprise. I was standing in the middle of a hum of 20 people busily making art in the Art2life Workshop at Westerbeke Ranch in Sonoma, CA.

I asked a question. I just kind of threw it out there… “Who in the room during this workshop so far, has wondered if they are good enough to make their art?

Before I even finished the question, there was a collective sigh and every single person in the workshop raised their hands.

It is bewildering to me that this kind deep uncertainty follows art making around. I sometimes feel this way too. It doesn’t seem to matter your level of art experience either.

Why? And more importantly how do we get rid of this feeling?

I am not sure why. I just know that this problem never seems to go away. Maybe it has to do with the fact that we are making art. And art pulls at you, relies upon parts of you that are more vulnerable, more unknown, more delicate. Since we are always inventing, creating something we haven’t before we just never can feel entirely sure about what we are doing.

I wonder if dentists wake up in the middle of the night and get this sinking feeling too?

So maybe it just comes with the territory. I have never been able to entirely put it to rest.

I have, however, had some success in mitigating or minimizing these thoughts that can so easily undermine our self-confidence… We have two kinds of thinking around our art making. When something good happens, maybe we receive an award, or someone buys several paintings or we just fall in love with what we have created, we feel more confident. We feel happier. Generally, we like these kinds of thoughts. I do. We always want more of these.

And then there are the negative kinds of thoughts. Maybe no one buys anything at a show. Maybe you spend the first day in a workshop surrounded by people who all seem to be making art that is better than yours. Maybe you just don’t like at all what you have made at the end of the day. Your art sucks. We generally want less of these.

So both responses, both reactions to what we perceive, need to be looked at together, instead of separately. The problem as I see it is that we are selectively choosing the good ones over the bad ones, grasping for more of the good ones and trying really hard to keep the bad ones at bay. Even though, for most of us, they manage to creep in. They come no matter what we do. They seem to come together.

So what I decided to do was to not bother too much with either of them. In other words putting too much focus on either the good or the bad is just one big distraction. I notice if I overly focus on some uber positive thing that just occurred in my career, in no short time some equally crappy thing comes along to knock me back down to earth. The ups seem to match the downs. And it gets tiring.

Instead, the workaround for me has been to shift where I put my attention. I like to put it on the one totally solid piece of terra firma I have.

My art practice. How I feel when I am in the process of making art.

I can always make my art. I can control this. The practice, the moment-to- moment learning, surprise and wonder of it are always patiently waiting for me when I begin.

By emphasizing the present experience of making art, and not picking up either the good or the apparently bad ones swirling around your past or future art life, it becomes possible to even things out. And then slowly but surely, the curiosity, the wonder and even the joy begin to return. These are consistent and sustaining, but they only reside in one place… the experience, the moment-to- moment experience, of making your art.

How do you manage feelings of uncertainty in making your art?

Sometimes using an orbital sander will change everything.

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Wandering through the northern Italian town of Tirano, I am struck by the very old, stonewalls. They circumscribe every property, miles of village roadways and impossibly steep hillside terraces. They are simply beautiful. Utilitarian but incredibly artful, their refined quality I can still see. This was how hillsides, roads and olive orchards were delineated and terraced centuries ago.

I imagine it took decades to complete many of these walls. But since they have existed for centuries, the investment of time and energy seems totally worth it. Whether the wall is in a forgotten corner of the city or lining a barely used road leading up the hill from the center of town, they are all made with the same degree of refinement. Stones are chosen and composed within these walls to complement one another. Large massive stones give way to patterns of smaller ones. Repetition of stone shapes and sizes are as varied and surprising as the pattern or passage of any painting I have ever done.

Walking up these steep village roads linking these tiny mountain Italian villages, the stonework accompanies me for miles. Although the maker of this wall is long forgotten I can feel his calloused but sensitive hands even now. It was only one of many moments in a single day of many but in that moment he, no doubt, held up a stone, felt its weight, considered its most smooth, most flattest side and then for time memorial, placed it just so into this wall.

These walls were not slapped together. You can tell. They are gorgeous displays of craftsmanship, care and design. I wonder if what I spend my time making, paintings composed of questionable brands of store bought oil paint, will last the test of time as well as these walls? How is what I make any different? Like those artisans that made these walls so long ago I too am just demonstrating my selectivity. I too am choosing my preferences in color, shape and line to make something.

Maybe that is just it. That is what all art is about. Whether it is a stonewall, a new recipe, an arrangement of cut flowers or even an abstract painting. It is an orientation to life. That the decisions, the choices we make, do matter especially when they result in something that stands outside of us. When we actually manifest something. It becomes part of the world. We leave it behind as a reminder of who we were and who we became.

Maybe the greatest benefit of our art is not for us. Maybe it is about what is felt and experienced by those who come across what we have made, maybe centuries later. When we too will probably be mostly forgotten. But then, in just a glance, in just a moment they too will get a sense of who we were and what, in the end, mattered to us.

Here’s Here’s how I start…

How do you start?

The more you do, the more you do and conversely the less you do, the less you do. This is how I experience my art making. When I am making a lot of art- possibly for an upcoming show then oddly I am able to do even more. I might be busy, I might be painting almost every day but because of this reason, the fact that I am so in it, I am so involved in my art daily, I can do even more.

So when I have been absent, as I have been for the past month, (I am writing this on a train that is crossing Switzerland) and I have not been making art, then I hardly am able to do a sketch in my sketchbook. It is almost like I don’t even make art. The less you do tends to prompt even less.

Which is ok, of course. But what I find interesting is how we find our way back to our art. I notice for me it is initiated by some random inspiration, such as stumbling across someone else’s art that moves me towards wanting to experience making my own art again. Sometimes it takes such a small prompt. I was just in Provencia, a small town on the Island of Mallorca. The patina walls of this small town were what got me taking pictures, composing potential compositions for my next paintings.

I never know what it is going to take. And that is half the fun. It is almost like the universe will never wait too long to steer you back to your art.

In the Creative Visionary Path online program, one of the participants told me that she had signed up for the program for this very reason. She was hoping it would help her get back to her art. But it didn’t work. After working for several weeks she still didn’t feel inspired. She pushed on and even ordered some art supplies from Amazon.com that I recommended for the program. (And yes, buying brand new art materials is one of the most common ways to jump-start yourself back to your art.) But this didn’t work either.

She was, however, tired of paying all the expensive delivery charges so before she put through this order of art materials to Amazon, she signed up for “Amazon Prime”. This is an additional annual fee paid to Amazon which allows you to get most things ordered, delivered for free. It is totally worthwhile if you order frequently from Amazon. Which obviously is the intent on their part.

Part of what you get besides free delivery, is access to a selection of videos, movies and shows that you can watch for free. Which she did.

She became engrossed in one particular show, a series actually, that was set in law offices, which coincidentally had tons of art on the office walls. In every episode of the show, there was a constant stream of new art on the walls. By looking at this art in this series, she inadvertently began to understand many of the Art2life principles that were being talked about in the Creative Visionary Path Program. Something clicked. Looking at this art on the set of a television series, was in the end what re ignited her passion to start making her own again. This is such a perfect example of how circuitous a path can be in returning ourselves to our art. You never know.

It is somewhat comforting, I think, that if we stray too far from what our creative soul desires, somewhere, somehow, someone will surely just give us a little nudge in the right direction, back to our art.

How do you find your way back to your art?

There is always something that seems to come along practically every day that keeps you from doing your Art. I see it in workshops with people who have come so that they can have a free week to make art. Even though they are away from everything in their normal life, something happens that distracts them. Sometimes it is an email from a friend or loved one with some news that changes everything—once it was a bee sting and then last time I taught a workshop in Sayulita, Mexico it was a dramatic evening windstorm that came out of nowhere while we were all at dinner. All our art panels, paper, and brushes were blown out of our open-air studio and were scattered across about a ¼ mile of rain forest. I permanently lost one of my 12 x 12 paintings.

Sometimes I wonder if distractions come because in a way we are looking for them. I know sometimes it feels good to have a legitimate reason to not go into the studio. Then who can blame you? This big thing came along and I just had to deal with it. Maybe it is just something that forces us or allows us guilt free to take breaks from our art. Or perhaps it is just totally random.

I write this blog, always waiting to the last minute, on Wednesday evening. It comes into your inbox on Thursday. I try to never miss. That is my goal. I always have something to write about by the time Wednesday comes around. But this time I didn’t. Maybe it is because I am far away on the small island of Mallorca, in Spain. I was procrastinating late last night wondering if this would be the one time in the past few years that I wouldn’t pull of writing my weekly blog.

And then I got a perfect excuse. Late last night I realized that my Gmail account email had been hacked. This person or persons had gone into my email and blocked my email to my assistant Ferris as well as my financial / accounting service. They also blocked all incoming email from these parties too.

And then they proceeded to impersonate me to them and them to me. It was like I was having conversations with them via email but the emails were a little misspelled and all these people seemed a little distracted. But I believed I was actually in conversation with them.

However once they started to direct me to start using a new bank account temporarily and transfer my money into a different random account, I began to be concerned. Ferris and the bookkeepers were also receiving orders from “me” directing them to do the same. Well, we figured it out at about 4 am my time last night, with all of us using texting and not emailing for awhile we didn’t’ know who was actually who. I changed email passwords as well as drop box, my bank account was frozen as a result and I was up all night totally freaked out.

The silver lining, if there could be one, was that I awoke late this morning with the perfect excuse to not do what I was having a hard time doing to…this blog post. This is serious. I almost lost my savings.

But after thinking about it, I realized I did have a story to tell, albeit a cautionary one. So do change your email passwords regularly. Check your settings whenever you get a weird email especially from someone you know. They just might be an imposter posing as your friend.

But don’t obsess over this as I have been doing the last 24 hours. Just be more careful with your passwords or leaving your computer open.

And go back to your art.

I just arrived in Marbella, a small coastal town in southern Spain. There was so much preparation, so many little things to take care of before I left that I hadn’t thought too much about how it would feel to be here. I have learned over the years that dropping into someplace entirely different is always incredibly stimulating and rejuvenating. It almost doesn’t matter where you go but just that you do. It fuels the creative fire, at least for me, big time. The only criteria that seem to matter is that you end up someplace very different than where you began.

These days I just go on faith that once I get someplace all the headaches of getting there – crunching my 6’ 4” frame into those seats for 10 hour flights, paying all that money to fly as well having the stress of wrapping everything up before leaving will all be worth it.

I arrived late in the day yesterday and actually hadn’t slept at all on the plane. So it wasn’t really till this morning, oddly waking up at 5:30 am and deciding to go for a long run along the beach, that it dawned on me that I was someplace different.

As I picked my way down the narrow cobbled streets towards the beach, swallows swirled above me. The sun was just rising and it cast a beautiful orange light on the town’s old stone and stucco walls. These walls are centuries old. Every building, every wall has such rich color and texture because there has been so much time involved in its creation.

I immediately thought back to just a few weeks ago where in a painting video I was talking about creating rich surface and texture in art. I mentioned this very idea of the benefit of time. That often in making art, the more time you spend en route to figuring out your painting, mistakes and all, that usually the painting will end up much richer and more interesting. The basic idea being that the more you participate with your art, the more time you spend on it, the more of you will be in it.

Time is not something that we generally measure or calibrate our creative efforts with. I don’t think too much about it. The idea of time, for me,  is usually partly one of frustration because I have so little of it. There always is so much to do. But here, as I am running through this town it occurs to me that this principle, this factor of time is a big part of why this place is so mesmerizing, so beautiful.

These walls have taken centuries to become this way. Interestingly, time feels slower here. People are less in a rush.

Maybe time shouldn’t always be thought about in terms of its relative scarcity. Maybe time is a positive force in our life and art, but we just are moving so fast all the time that we don’t notice it. It passes without our effort. It is perfectly even and only becomes fractured when we do.

The whole town is still asleep. Even the dogs seem uninterested at this early hour and barely look up as I run by. Empty wine bottles still sit upon sidewalk café tables, leftover from long, slow dinners last night.

On this bright early morning, it seems that it is just me that is moving fast.

My pace does seem a little too fast. I check my running watch and although this isn’t a particularly fast pace for me, I decide to slow down anyway.

Returning after a break from making your art can be tricky. But the answer is surprisingly simple…

I clearly remember idolizing certain artist’s work. That happened a lot because there is just a ton of art out in the world that is amazing. I used to compare my art to the highest standards I could find. In many cases I loved other people’s work much more than mine. And I guess that is to be expected because, especially in the beginning your art is not as developed as possibly someone else’s who has been working much longer. It is hard to compare.

I remember thinking that if I could hang any art on my walls it certainly wouldn’t be mine. It would be a specific handful of paintings of other people’s art.

Friends wondered why I didn’t have more of my art on my walls. I used to say that I was looking at my art all day long so I didn’t need to see more of it. But looking back I think the real reason was that I didn’t really love what I was doing or how it often turned out. There was a disconnect between what I was making and what I loved. Maybe I didn’t believe I could make the kind of work that I loved. Or maybe I was just scared to really try. I think the latter was more the reason.

Anytime in life when you commit, when you say out loud what you want, even though the chances are slim you will ever get it, the fear of failure grows bigger. This probably is the case because the chances of failure are bigger. It feels much safer to keep things pretty good and pass on trying for great.

The only problem I found with this thinking is that pretty good is just that. It is kind of boring after a while. At some point, it seems important to go for something big. Something that matters to you. It might not be your art. It could be anything. The only real criteria is that it matters to you. Big time.

So at some point, for me, things began to shift. Or rather, my thinking did. I raised the bar on the kind of art I was making. I eventually decided that, even though it was scary to ask myself for greatness, I would start trying anyway. I set about trying to make only the kind of art I loved.

Obviously I couldn’t pull it off all the time. In fact, rarely did the outcome match my expectations. I think this is the case for all artists. But the important thing, I believe, is that we have the expectation. That we are fully in.

Today I do hang my art on some of my walls. I am not tired of it at all. It reminds me that I have to keep trying to make art that I love. That it is possible to make something that matters so much that you just can’t let it go. That occasionally we can create something that is such a part of us, that it is even too painful to sell.

When this happens you know you are on to something. Something that is way better than pretty good. It is something that matters. It is a once in a blue moon kind of a something. And it is actually, great.