me vs. me

comparison isn't always the thief of joy!

me vs. me:

August 17th vs. September 3rd

Comparison isn’t always the thief of joy!

I have one week left in my 30-day creative sprint. But, I haven’t been sprinting toward a finish line. For me, sprints are more like, “How focused can I be on one project without expecting myself to have infinite energy and attention for a bunch of other shit at the same time?”

So to understand my progress I’ve got to work with different metrics than, “What’s finished?”

Instead, I’m studying myself:

Each day of practice I take photos of the canvas at the beginning and the end— and a bunch of times in between. Then when I’m done for the day, instead of flopping down and zoning out, I dip into my progress shots and make myself new side-by-side images of what’s changed.

Then: I study them.

Y’all, I don’t know why this is so powerful, it just is.

While painting you’re doing so much real-time problem solving over the course of hours, it can be easy to forget where you started and where you’re going! So reviewing the evidence in side-by-side photos is gold.

And just seeing the work tiny on a phone has its own power to illuminate areas that need attention. (After standing three inches from a 5’ canvas all day I can only walk so far away to get the bigger picture!)

And talk about a confidence booster!! That photo I opened this letter with?? It cracks me up every time I look at it. That is exactly what being an artist feels like so much of the time. How easily we can go from “Am I actually broken???” to total creative flow in a matter of days!

Coming into consciousness this morning, I tuned in to a Tara Brach talk where she quoted this lovely bit of poetry:

Life is a garden, not a road.
We enter and exit through the same gate, wandering.
Where we go matters less than what we notice.

That felt just perfect surrounded by this blooming garden of mine.

So, here’s a few of the things I’ve noticed along the way on this piece I’m calling “Gonzo & Camilla”…

PM to AM: An over-worked first drawing I was too frustrated with to take a proper picture, and the changes I made in the morning.

Where the name Gonzo & Camilla came from: I got carried away on the butterfly body and suddenly it looked like a fifteen pound muppet. Redrew that the next day.

A.M. to P.M.: One surprisingly long day of white paint.

Gonzo’s gettin’ cute now tho!

A prompt for you:

Using “Life is a garden, not a road” as our launch-point, consider this format:

“Life is a_______, not a ______”

Take a few minutes to freewrite as many of these as you can. Let random stuff fly out of your mind: Life is a bucket not a bandaid! Life is a crew cut, not a candle! I don’t know! Get weird!

Once you’ve got a bunch of those, take one that makes you chuckle, or that really calls your attention, set a ten-minute timer, and expand on that idea.

I’d love to hear your magic:

Happy gardening!

XOXO,