A Daily Practice Retrospective

A detail of one of my January 2022 10 x 10 cm map collages

This week as I return from sitting my art exhibition, my daily practice draws me back to my studio, to dream, to plan, to remember the feel of material thinking.

I am collaging with maps, small squares of a landscape that take me travelling through time and memories, into the future with places I would like to go or are planning to go. Forward thinking into a landscape before I arrive.

I’ve written many blogposts about having a daily practice. It is the most consistent thing in my entire life as an artist, a regularity that provides structure, routine and freeform artistic experimentation.

I have also written about the benefits of creating art daily as an accountability practice. What I have now realised is that it is also an important tool for reviewing your own artistic development. I look at the daily artworks I made in 2010, I find them now quite derivative of other people’s images. At that time I was not confident in my ability to draw or make marks of my own, yet it gave me something tangible to do to document my daily life.

I review the works I made in 2020 and 2021, exploring tentatively with colour and colour combinations created through ink play. I realise that a daily practice developed my confidence in using colour. It allowed me to ‘paint’ with paper pulp confidently during 2021. If I had not had that daily practice, I wouldn’t have thought it possible. I wouldn’t have known how to experiment.

This year in 2022 I have returned to collage, consciously. I can see my mark making and compositions are more confident, the colour and ink marks work together. I know this is a practice of surrender, of letting hands take over the work, of allowing materials to talk to each other. Wondering at the stories that come to life as the lines and forms take shape.

If there is one thing I can pass on to anyone who feels their creativity needs a boost, it is building a daily practice into your life. Ten minutes of creativity done daily will allow your thoughts to expand, your focus to deepen and your hands to become more confident. If you keep it up for a year, you have 365 works of art, and for 10 years you have a body of work, a legacy of your thoughts and creative offerings for a decade of your life. It’s worth starting today.

A week of January 2022 map collages