From Procrastination to Creation

I’ve never been much of a procrastinator, until recently. For the last three months I’ve been “procrasti-painting.”  I don’t know who coined the word procrasti-painting, but it’s a good way to describe what us painters do when resistance rears its ugly head. We paint other things that are easier but less important. We don’t work on the painting that will test our limits and stretch our comfort zone.

Luckily, it finally dawned on me that all the things I’ve been painting lately, while delightful and fun, were helping me avoid doing the work I was afraid to try for fear of failing or not being good enough. What if I couldn’t achieve the blendy edges and softness that I unearthed at the workshop I had attended in June in New Orleans? What if those first two paintings were a fluke? What if I couldn’t paint that way on much bigger canvas? This fear and avoidance is classic resistance (read War of Art by Steven Pressfield), and I knew the only cure was to act… to begin… to start the damn painting.

Still, I fumbled along for another week playing in my art journal and working on other paintings. I did other things until the inner pressure of wanting to start but being afraid to, continued build until I was I so uncomfortable that the only relief was to take action and “just do it.”

Finally, I grabbed a big canvas and sprayed paint on it. I made a photo grid of a Fox that I got from Unsplash and sketched it onto the canvas. I put out blobs of paint for the first layer and sprayed mists of water on the canvas to keep the paint from drying too fast. And, I got to work applying the paint, quickly and intuitively, all the while working to keep the brushwork and the edges of the fox loose and / or soft. 

An hour or so later, I stood back from the canvas … and I liked what saw! It was a good, solid start. This seedling of start will need to be nurtured with practice and care. Still, I shook my head, bewildered at why I had resisted at all! It was a marvel really, all the fuss and avoidance of those three months.

Maybe procrasti-painting isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it gave me the time to work up the courage to start. Either way, the irony of resistance is that, once overcome, we often look back and wonder why we hesitated in the first place. When we do the hard thing, we often discover we are more capable than we thought.

Here is a sneak peak at early start of something new…