Lifestyle

Daily + Practice = Life

Daily practice defines your weekly and yearly practice, then it defines your life. Take heed, artists! Ideas for daily practice which in turn become your lifestyle:

  • Close looking at a chosen object or scene for 5-10 minutes
  • Close looking at a piece of art for 5-10 minutes
  • Reading a book about art (yes, a book!)
  • Writing about art (kind of like dancing about architecture, but being able to think and talk about art is important for organizing the complex ideas that art presents)
  • Skill building in your chosen media
  • Creating work in your chosen media
  • Sketching for a specific duration—a podcast I heard recently said ‘do a skill for 20 minutes a day for 20 days.’ That sounds incredibly solid, do you agree?
  • Brainstorming and developing concepts in order to plan a piece in advance
  • Creating experiments and exercises for yourself to skill build or further understand the capabilities of your media: creating your own exercises is key to any skill building endeavor. Mentors and teachers can only take you so far—you must become your own teacher through experimentation and dedication.

Mantras in Second Person

You read, you write, you think.

You draw, you paint, you journal.

You carve, you erase, you build.

You are part of the every day, yet completely separate.

You are in your own world—if even for a moment.

You are an artist.