|
During several years of all-day, everyday instruction at Pete Bougie's atelier in Minneapolis -- which was a minimum one-hour commute from my home during rush hour, and could go to well over two hours in winter weather -- I really struggled sometimes to drag myself over there.
But I almost always made it. And of the select works from that period that I consider "keepers," as many seem to have been produced on low-motivation days as on energized ones. Somehow, after getting kids to school, making that commute, setting up the easel on my taped marks, and acknowledging that the model had been sufficiently motivated to show up, I settled into the routine and the regimen and did the work.
I am, according to my spouse, easily distracted, and there are hundreds of things I could do with my time -- many of them very enjoyable and productive -- other than draw or paint. The hazard for me has always been developing bad habits (and I have a few favorites). The habit of deciding that I just don't want to "do art" today is no more difficult to embrace than the habit of showing up. And for me, it's a bit insidious, because the less artwork I'm producing (or the less writing I do or the longer I let tasks smoulder on the back burner), the less connected I feel to the process, and the harder -- day to day -- it becomes to break that habit and begin the now-harder (sometimes discouraging) work of getting back up to speed.
|