When in doubt, keep things simple

Ninth day of the new year, but it still feels like maybe only the third to me. Wrestling with thoughts when, perhaps, I shouldn’t be thinking so much. S i m p l i f y .

Rob Cham wisely sums up the conundrum.

Studio practice. An artists’ phrase, but the same idea applies to everything one wants to be good at. Again– showing up; doing the work. That’s what it gets down to. What I’m striving for is the same kind of discipline that comes fairly easily to me [most of the time] for the design work); applying that discipline to Art- to the process that once came so easily as to fill up much of my spare time (that’s a phrase invented by adults for use in describing all those free hours possessed by children and young adults), without even thinking about it or realizing how freely it happened.

It’s a bit of a mind-bender still; the idea of applying discipline to something that for so long was simply fun. People think all of it is “fun”- art, graphic design, illustration– that all of these things are FUN! (It can make it difficult to get paid a living wage, at times, these preconceptions people have…) But when it’s for real (i.e. not one’s hobby), it takes a lot of hours, work and discipline.