Thought of the week

"Inspiration is for amateurs -- the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will -- through work -- bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great "art idea." And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you'll know what you do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere."

-- Chuck Close

What I'm reading: The Little Book of Talent

This book and its predecessor (The Talent Code) were recommended to me by one of my art teachers. The first book explores the idea of "how do you get good at something"? Coyle looks at the circumstances that makes people excel at a skill, and it's not necessarily where you'd think: the run-down Russian tennis club that has produces multiple tennis stars, the North Baltimore Aquatic Club that Michael Phelps (as well as several other Olympic medalists) trained at, and so on. It turns out you don't need state-of-the-art equipment or the highest tech to make a champion -- usually the opposite, in fact. What you do need is a relentless focusing on the basics as well as constant practice and review.

While The Talent Code was an overview of these ideas, The Little Book of Talent discusses more practical applications of these ideas. There are bite-sized chapters encapsulating the ideas like:

• Spend fifteen minutes a day engraving the skill on your brain
• Choose five minutes a day over an hour a week
• Don't fall for the prodigy myth

And, probably my favorite, tip #5:

Be willing to be stupid

He uses some great examples to back up his points (tip #21: Think in images). It's a really short book, about 125 pages, with space for notes (tip #4: Buy a notebook) in the back. I find it a really motivating book and one that I'll be referring to quite a bit in the future.

Figure painting workshop

I finished a figure painting workshop this weekend -- Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

It was pretty tiring -- I'm not used to painting five hours a day, that's for sure. It was really fun painting from live models, although it was difficult capturing the image. I take a weekly figure drawing class from the same teacher so I think I was able to use some of those gesture capturing skills much better than the last time I took the class (last November, I think). Manipulating the paint in the time given, though -- that was harder, especially as we added more colors as the weekend went on.

I think the two big things I took from the class are:

1) I need to paint and draw more on my own. I need to practice gestures a lot more as well. There was a time where I was knocking out quick gestures (5-10 seconds) for a couple of hours every day. I need to get back to that as well as painting more often.

2) Color! A class like this shows me how shaky I am at color identification and mixing. I'm still at that point where I try to match a color be mixing it and putting it down on the canvas and I go, "no, that's not quite right..." but sometimes I just can't articulate why. We were talking this weekend about greenish shadows or purplish fleshtones and most of the time I just couldn't see it. I think (and hope) that if I do more of (1) that (2) will follow.

Here's a quick study I was really pleased with this weekend: