The Artist’s Way: Week 1

Week 1 of The Artist’s Way has come to a close and… I have yet to work on a single painting. This is not a slight towards the book—it has been the catalyst for much inspiration and the creation of a schedule for painting moving forward! But going into this, I am realizing how creatively blocked I have been. Despite writing and meditating on how badly I want to paint in my morning pages, I’m beginning to recognize what my primary block is: time. I never feel like have enough time to just sit and paint. I have time, surely, to daydream about becoming a great painter, and to journal about all of the things I intend to do, but actually sitting down and doing the work has proved difficult.

One of my intentions while working through this program is to develop better time management skills so that I can paint daily, even if only for 30 minutes. But, I’ve developed a mental habit that leads me to believe that for me to have a successful painting session, I need 2 hours of focused painting (at least!) for my time to be worth it. So, another intention, is to change my values around the time it takes to be successful. I do genuinely feel that to become a good painter I have to paint often and for long durations, and while this dedication and desire for disciplined is valuable, it has begun to cripple my progress. If there is ever a day where my morning routine has gone off the rails and dipped into my painting time before work, I already feel as if all is lost. This needs to change, so I hope to continue brining my attention to limiting values like my values around time. For the remainder of this post. I’ll talk about the main themes within this chapter and my reflections on those themes.

Week 1

This week is aptly titled “Recovering a Sense of Safety” and provides readers with the different blocks that often keep us from creating art. From social expectations to do a certain type of job (one not related to art, of course), to our own expectations and negative beliefs, this chapter helps us to reflect on the different things that make us feel unsafe in our creative expression and in the pursuit of art as a career. One of the most helpful details that lingers throughout this section is the idea that art CAN be a viable career, that it does not require us to live as the “starving artist” stereotype, and that we can often water down our true desires as an artists due to the nature of the discourse around art as a job.

This chapter asks us to consider: If you could be an artists in the most successful way possible for you, what would that look like? This is not a question that should be responded to at face value. It requires meditation and the removal of a few walls to get to the root desire. For myself (I won’t go into all of the hairy details) but I discovered that I don’t just want to paint, paint well, and sell my art work. I want a minor presence in the art community, I want to become a master, and, because I still deeply enjoy and guard my privacy, I want to be well known but not too well known. I’d like to be a bit of an enigma in the art world, but present enough to make connections with great artists and explore the community.

What this chapter is urging us to do, in my opinion, is to be a little bit selfish. To ignore all of the outside chatter, to play and imagine the furthest we could go with our creative dreams, and then to take small steps to replace our previous values about art with new ones that allow us to feel safe and secure as creators. These new values will likely seem a bit far fetched to us, one example could be changing the age old adage that creatives are “starving artists” to something powerful, like creatives are financially secure, abundant, and wealthy even.

Conclusion