Before anything else today I want to welcome and thank new subscribers! I usually turn off notifications for apps and websites to enhance my focus in life and creative work, but for this project I left notifications on, knowing that each subscriber creates more motivation to keep writing. It has been incredibly encouraging to listen as my phone pings away after posting, letting me know that each of you has hit the subscribe button! :) And please, if you are enjoying what you read and discover here, share it with a friend that might enjoy it too.
Creative practice is an elastic, dynamic thing. Sometimes it is Big: consistent, productive, quantifiable, visible. Sometimes it is Small: opportunistic, process oriented, subtle.
Last week, when I was writing about beginning my practice again in my early thirties, I was mostly writing about the reboot of my Big Practice, the kind that, in a culture fixated on productivity and growth, can seem more legitimate. But if we are to sustain a creative practice over our lifetime, we must have both.
This week I’ll rewind my story to include my experience with Small Practice, because (I believe) when we tell our whole stories we help one another along the way to wholeness.
Like so many of us, I loved drawing and music and daydreaming and making things as a child, and that continued through high school (emphasis on the daydreaming part, haha) and into college. As an art student, I was rarely without a sketchbook or camera, spent late nights in the painting studio, and developed a deep romanticism about what it is to be an artist. After graduating college, I immediately set up painting spaces wherever I was living and made large wild paintings, began conversations with galleries, and within a few years secured a solo show. My practice was big, messy, passionate, and immersive. I had a Big Practice and it felt good.
Then in my mid-twenties, I had two children. In fact, at that solo show opening I was eight months pregnant! After becoming a parent I continued trying to do things the same way. I thought that if I just tried hard enough I could operate as before, with little change to my practice. As a result, it fell apart for a few years.
It didn’t fall apart because creative practice wasn’t available to me. It fell apart because all I knew was Big Practice and it took me a while to downshift into a smaller, quieter version of my practice that could accommodate the changes in my life. I clung to the “before” instead of flowing with the “now”. There was a three-year period where I oscillated between not making art at all, and privately making small paintings and drawings on paper. Time and space weren’t necessarily the biggest barriers; during one of those years I had one of the loveliest studios I’ve ever had and also had lots of support from my partner. It was simply that the big-project-priority bandwidth I had used to nurture my Big Practice was now being funneled into those two little developing people.
After a few years of struggle, I saw that if my art-making was to survive in a vital way, I had to ditch my all-or-nothing approach and embrace the new reality that I inhabited. My practice shifted toward smaller creative acts. I took long walks and simply paid attention to daily happenings. I sketched and wrote in notebooks. I engaged my curiosity while I explored the world with my children. I made things with them and learned how their creative impulses worked. For them, creating was like breathing, a cycle of action and response, an innate pulse.
It was a small practice, and I let it be enough. Letting go, into Small Practice, was what kept me going and allowed me to eventually begin building my Big Practice again, slowly, slowly…like breathing, a cycle of action and response, an innate pulse.
We all have slow periods when we can’t engage with making our art in the way we like, when the aperture of available time or attention is contracted or closed to us. It's easy to discount the slower and more subtle periods of practice. But the truth is that Small Practice is powerful too, and in fact, when we are fully engaged in our Big Practice, Small Practice is there, operating in tandem, driving and shaping our work. It’s the low background hum of awareness and curiosity that anyone sustaining a creative practice knows well, always there for us when we need it.
What about you? How have you engaged with Small and Big Practice? How has your practice shifted and flexed with life events? Leave a comment :)
Gleanings
“Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?” – Rumi
This resonated, from Seth Godin’s “The Practice”:
“If you are using outcomes that are out of your control for your work, it’s inevitable that you will burn out. Because it’s not fuel you can replenish, and it’s not fuel that burns without a residue.”
Things You Can Control, via Swiss Miss
I’ve been enjoying the Just Looking newsletter.
Mary Oliver on writing while walking in the woods