How to bring back joy into your art - an experiment

If you are an artist who works dutiful, diligently, and daily to support yourself through your art (or something else...), possibly there is a moment when you lose you fire and the joy behind creating something new. Actually, you feel like nothing you produce is new: you have found your style and know what your costumers want. Maybe you have learned to compromise between pursuing your creative hunches and your audience expectations. Maybe someone told you good art does not sell or some shit honourable attempt of a helping phrase. Or your works are so time consuming and hung up on details, that you no longer love the process of working, because you cannot see the big picture, cannot see your idea behind the small steps. Perhaps it starts to rain, and you feel so sad and then you get drunk and paint your studio black and tell the next best person he can have your brushes and shove them… wait… joking, I just got carried away :-D


Before something bad happens, you should try out something different…And with ‘you’ I naturally mean ‘me’: So here it comes one of my methods to have some fun and change work back to a playful experiment with colours. Abandoning style and brushstroke, topics and prizes.

Step one: Chance
I start directly after working on a (serious) painting. Normally I have some paint left and it would be a shame to throw it away. So, I take the palette and smack it on a cardboard (or medium of choice). Sometimes I stop here, sometimes I repeat this multiple times. I now have a completely random starting point for my experiment (not my natural way… I normally make sketches and colour test and so on) By the way, best choose a cardboard or canvas size, that you could finish in one sitting.


Step two: Observation
I stare mindfully observe the colour pattern on my cardboard and then decide on what I see – a little bit like a Rorschach test, but without the psychological interpretation. As I firstly observed the pattern on my example I imagined grey and white flowers around the existing colour splashes in the middle of the image, but then I turned the cardboard, and everything changed: there it was the… ahem… the … multifeet-big-butt-dragon :-D


Step three: Decision
Now all I must do is filling in what’s missing. Some dots on its fur, the talons, his belly and most important his face. Because the whole cardboard is already splattered with colour there is no right and wrong, no artful detail, just shaping what chance gives me.


Step four:
To enhance the flowing, I like to work fast and rough. I use fast drying pastose paint. I use the wooden end of the brush, a palette knife, or my fingers. I do not clean my instruments but simply work with mixed colours or wipe excess paint away with some cloth. Sometimes I speed up the process with music and I often use unfamiliar position to work in, e.g. sitting on the ground or sitting before a table (I normally stand for painting).


Step five:
Stop. When the rush is over simply stop, put everything away and grab something to eat. You can change the music to something relaxing and dim the light. Or if you are little bit more like me, you think about burning your piece of art or admire your genius or better: both at the same time :-D





Please try this at home and maybe you want to share your experiences, photos of a completely sprinkled workroom, your multicoloured hands or whatever came into being.