Creative Continuity
The generative power of simply showing up...
I’ve been thinking a lot about what juices a creative practice and I’ve come to the conclusion that what my creative practice needs most to feel full and flowing are the most boring, unsexy, and absolutely necessary things: consistency and continuity. I’ve struggled with both for the last few months, so this post is my reminder to myself of all the things I’ve learned through experience and practice. There is generative magic in consistency and simply putting oneself in the way of the work to be done.
Integrating what I know about consistency and continuity started with a convergence of two events. When I was in my mid-thirties I had a studio built in my backyard. It was tiny and perfect: 160 square feet of all mine! And while it was small, I grew so much larger as an artist in that space. I’m still so grateful for all that that little studio held and taught me. Around the same time, I attended a yoga retreat, where we worked on creating a purpose statement, or “Sankalpa”. The Sanskrit word Sankalpa has two roots: san, meaning "a connection with the highest truth," and kalpa, meaning "vow". For five days, we practiced asana (poses) and pranayama (breathwork), meditated, and wrote for hours. The statement was to be only one or two sentences. In the end, I reduced mine to two words: Show Up.
Those two words could be applied liberally in all areas of my life, in different ways, and the way that I applied them to my creative practice was literal and physical. I made a commitment to myself to show up in my studio every day, whether I felt like it or not. Ideally, to work, and if I couldn’t work because of time or temperament, my agreement with myself was that I had to walk out there and at least spend a few minutes. Part of the idea here was to decouple the idea of performance and production from my legitimacy as an artist. I wanted the work to spring from a place of authenticity and autonomy, untroubled by performance anxiety and self-imposed pressure to prove myself. And I was also curious–what would happen if I dedicated myself to this regularity without as much striving? So this was the deal: I could paint or draw, I could read, I could look at work in progress, I could sweep the floor, I could write, or I could simply take a cup of tea out to the studio and sit on my stool at the window and watch my children jump on the trampoline. It didn’t matter what I did, but I had to physically put myself in my studio. I had to show up.
I kept that agreement with myself for the better part of a year, and it taught me so much. It reminded me that “feeling” inspired or “feeling” like working are unreliable motivators. The best way to feel like working is to start working and the best way to feel inspired is to engage with my materials. I noticed that the more I showed up, the less friction I felt when getting started. I loved that feeling of entering the studio and feeling the cloak of the day slide off me, an effortless entry into flow. And I also learned that consistency was a gentler and more reliable way toward what I was striving for all along, a productive and meaningful workflow.
Eventually, when my continuity and studio momentum was well-established, I became more flexible and began taking days off. But the months that I had shown up every day had set the tone. I developed ways to maintain a sense of connection, even when I could not be in the studio every day. Here are some of the habits and methods that I still use today…
Consistency still matters. Even if I can’t be in the studio every day, frequency and consistency are still super important to maintain my sense of continuity in my work. I try to get into the studio as often as possible.
Always have work at different stages of development. When I step into the studio I have a few choices of where to begin and naturally gravitate toward the work that matches my energy or focus level.
Related: Try to have multiple projects going at once. I like to at least have one firmly established body of work and one that is in the development stage. The timing on this is super organic, but I tend to make a pivot in my established work and/or start a new body of work once or twice a year. Again, this gives me a variety of options for my work day. And sometimes a body of work needs time to ferment, so this way, I always have something to work on.
Leave work unfinished at the end of the day. This open project creates fluidity, helping me to bridge studio days.
When you do finish, start something new right away. At the very least, I make some notes about what I intend to start next. This supports my momentum.
Leave yourself notes. If you visit my studio on any given day, you’ll see at least half a dozen sticky notes around, on the walls, on my work table, in my studio notebook, and on the work itself. I have them in all colors and sizes, and I use so many of them! I make notes to myself about colors, what I think I want to do next on a painting, questions that came up while working, or what the next steps are. I use small brightly colored flags to compositionally mark where I’d like to place certain elements in a painting. I think of it as communicating with my future self, who might not remember tomorrow or next week what I am thinking today.
Keep a studio notebook. I love my Leuchterm dot notebooks for keeping my studio notes in. I’ll probably do a full post on this in the future, they are so indispensable to me. I write all kinds of random things in it. It’s an unstructured document, a capture device, and an external brain that only makes sense to me. Among the more practical things I use it for, I usually have a list of works in progress with sketches and color notes, a word bank, a materials shopping list, ideas for titles, random paragraphs about what I’m thinking about in terms of my work, and quotes. Where the sticky notes are ephemeral and usually thrown away, the studio notebook maintains a sense of continuity over the course of a year or two.
Take pictures of your day’s work with your phone and look at them before you go to sleep. At the end of the day, our sleepy porous brains are ready to process the inputs of the day–let your art be one of the things!
What about you? How do you keep things flowing in your studio practice? What are your tricks for bridging from one workday to the next? Let us know in the comments!
Until next week,
“Show up”. Such simple yet profound advice, as are the tips you listed for how to show up. Thanks so much.