Choice. Creativity. Focus. The perfect may be the enemy of the good, but the imagined can also be the enemy of the real. Sometimes creativity is the enemy of accomplishment.

Do you feel this way? Your brain is popping with ideas, but it is so d**d hard to work. Surrounded by supplies, do you also realize you are not working at all? Because working on one thing means not-working on so much else. How to choose?

Ask yourself:

What’s in my way?

What feels like too much?

What one thing will I do NOW?

Now, clear space and create air. This weekend, I gave away stuff:

Donated most of my dye supplies to a young textile artist. She was over the moon. The laces, the colors, now will be used instead waiting waiting waiting….
Handed my paper clay, bought in a fit of enthusiasm, to a friend who sculpts.
Used Freecycle to give glassware and china from my mother’s estate. The stuff had been in our basement over 10 years. Now it’s in happy homes. I feel lighter.

Those supplies were projects in my mind only. But they kept me from working. Now they no longer breathe down my neck.

Make a habit of creativity. Once the rhythm is there, the work comes. You develop creative muscles. You work when even when you “want” to. You bump against questions, then prod til you find answers. You create. Among my new questions: how to extend that habit beyond the daily hour, past teaching commitments and into my day. The answer? Anne Lamott: “Butt in chair. Just do it… You are going to feel like hell if you never [make] the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart…That is really all you have to offer us, and it’s why you were born.”

I have (re)discovered that one commitment produces daily questions to follow and ideas to try. I dream about color and composition. Some days I feel surrounded by an enticing song of colors. This single door - daily painting - leads to more possibilities. I am wondering:

How to move from small to larger?
How to stop sooner? To recognize and respect that more abstract energy?
What about layers, especially collage?
What of acrylics carries over into my watercolor teaching? When a student says “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I now look them in the eye to say, “That’s how painting feels.”

Special thanks to Alice Sheridan’s Interview with coach Judith Morgan. They discuss how Alice has grown her art practice in their years together.

I’d love to hear how you choose among the ideas that bubble up inside of you. We need to help each other move forward. Life is precious. We are lucky to make art.