Repetition (just kid yourself)
Daily collages made during a trip to New York in 2013. Pennsylvania Love and Imagine MoMA, October 2013.
Much of life is repetition. Getting up, eating, doing the dishes, cleaning your teeth and going to bed. These actions are so ingrained that you don’t have to think about them. You’ve been practising them all of your life.
When it comes to our creative practice though, we can often find excuses not to be active. Like we need to have a clean studio before we can create, or just a clean kitchen table. We may think we have not enough/too many tools and materials and don’t know how or where to start.
That’s where you have to ‘kid yourself’ into action. Small, incremental actions done regularly build your creative muscles. I’ve been likening my post-surgery recovery to my creative practice. Every day a little bit of walking or cycling or stretching. This week I realised these cumulative actions have substantially improved my mobility from two and three months ago, just like regular art making improves my skills and confidence.
When I first decided to commit to making art, I started a drawing a day. That only lasted for four months, but by the end of that time I was quite happy with my results. Then I committed to a daily collage and that felt about right, until I realised that it had achieved what I set out to do and I no longer needed to do it.
These days I make sure I sit in my studio for at least ten to twenty minutes a day. Pottering around, looking through art books or gazing at the walls; these help me slow down to get in the right frame of mind. I’m currently between projects and so I scrubbed down my bench and rearranged my workspace. I even changed the pictures on the wall. I rang an artist friend and it turned out she was doing exactly the same thing, making her space more ‘hers’.
Many artists I’ve talked to have found ways to ‘kid themselves’ into creating in a repetitive way. One artist draws into old book pages and creates ‘blackout text’ drawings, another creates on brown craft papers. I once attended a workshop where the artist marked his large sheets of paper with ink lines and circles before folding them into small books and then creating on the already marked papers. It’s a repetitive way to ‘beat the blank page’.
It’s the same with writing. If you write a sentence or two about each artwork you make when you are in process of creating them, then it is easier later on to craft an artist statement about what your work is about. Repetition with whatever task you do becomes a ‘body memory’.
This is the first year I’ve ever done a concerted exercise plan. The weekly repetition of going to Pilates means I am charting my progress incrementally. I see the same for making small repetitive artworks. Exercise and art; I never would have thought that they go together!
Making a series of small 10 × 10 cm cyanotypes. Constant repetition helps refine my image making.
