“What is the hardest part of your workout?” - Radio interviewer, to world-champion weight lifter. “Getting through the gym door.”

I think of this woman often, every time I find it hard to get “back in the saddle” after time away from my art.

We can find so many reasons not to work. Time. Space. Money. Life. The most pernicious perhaps is the voice that says “you’re no good.” My students wonder why keep trying? My own monkey-mind chatters about chores to do and classes to take. Don’t you wish you could teach that voice to be encouraging instead?

I had one student who insisted “I haven’t got any talent. YOU’ve got talent,” after every class. Another always sighed at the end of class: “I don’t know.” We were raised, it seems, on the myth that “talent” creates the piece. We were fed a story, where the genius (male) strides like a colossus, dominating the studio, lab, or workplace, and fearlessly creates success.

Let the myth go. It makes a good movie, but it’s not a good model.

When we make art, we engage in mystery. We also engage in hard work. There’s a reason you feel tired after a life-drawing class. Art is discovery, a continual process of engagement, questioning, and seeking answers. Show up, do the work, and you will make discoveries, too.

For me, art is a constant experience of treading into the unknown. Inchoate feeling rolls through me – joy, loss, anger, love – but how to translate these feelings into color, shape and line? The only path I know is show up and try. Make the ugly starts. Walk away. Come back. Try again. “Butt in chair,” writes Ann Lamott. Do the bad work. Then the good work begins.

Creating a room of your own helps. Maybe it’s an unused closet, a nook under the stairs, or a corner of the kitchen, but a place where your work and your tools can stay out, inviting you back, is a huge step towards creating the work you dream about. This summer I left my huge studio in Lowell for a small back bedroom. After much unboxing and sorting, tools are finally arranged on shelves and paints stand ready next to a work table, elevated on risers so I can work standing (and also so I can store more underneath). An easel on that table and another to the left, artwork rotating from them to the floor and back again, so I can work in a series.

At the end of September, I spent a full week framing up my landscape series, Here/Now, to hang at the Loading Dock Gallery. Then computer and bookkeeping issues ate up days, with a few hair-raising technical difficulties in the mix. Now comes the hard but joyous work of starting art-making again. Time to give myself over to the blank page, the unmixed colors, the infinite possibility. Inspired in part by a class I’m working through on-line, I’ve started a new series about the flowers rioting in autumn golds and purples on my back porch. They cheered me all summer. The bees knit amongst their blossoms in the July heat. In August, the sunflowers went to seed, and the finches and woodpeckers became our friends. Now the marigolds are in full bloom, still beautiful, but so soon to die. Something sweet and painful in that last intense beauty drives me. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’ve set out on the trip.

We are all such brief blossoms. Our souls are like studios, full of tools and possibilities. We need to step in each day, in spite of not-knowing. Pick up our brushes and try again.

Recently I sank into the quicksand of “You Should!” advice from the internet. A project I budgeted an hour for took two, then three, then a day then more. Shot through it were news reports and email updates. Twitter and Facebook. You can probably guess: I was a mess after two days. And that first job? Still not done. I forgot to paint. COVID isolation has driven me to listen more to podcasts and watch more videos, but I find if I take in too much advice, I get cranky. The real learning comes only when you turn off all the voices, and pick up your tools. Mix some colors. See how they work. What do you like? Do more of that. What do you hate? Stop that right now. Ask yourself, why? Like a sailor, feel the wind and adjust your sails to pick up the breeze.

I’ve learned that ugly work happens before the good work comes. The biggest surprise for me , again and again, is how sustained effort improves results. (Shades of those scales my piano teacher mom had me practice every day.) Keep working, and the ugly transform into the purposeful, the effort lifts to achievement. Often, I did not even see in happening.

Try working regularly on multiple efforts. Make a mark, a little progress. Stop after any change and turn to another piece. That pause between layers, to let them settle physically and also in your mind. Give the questions a rest before you judge. The best can happen if you act with confidence, then step away. Layers build. Each informs the next. The ugly will underlie and support the good, enriching your work. I now think of those first marks like leaves gathered up for compost. They are the ground, the soil that the work, still unseen, will take root in. The random first moves become energy I push against, overlay, and redirect.

Painting is like judo. Don’t force it. Respond. Identify what you like. Relax. Move with the piece towards what you love. Let the energy of what inspires you and what has appeared on the page steer you through the next marks you put on the page.

Embrace not-knowing. Each work of art is an act of reinvention. Once you let go of fear, all sorts of new things can happen. Some are “junk,” some educational. Some familiar, some a surprise. If you just start, you won’t be bored. Study your subject. Watch your page. What lines can you use? What shapes emerge? Notice relationships of mass and colors, and how they change. Work on in multiples, so every piece has time to chill, and so you don’t freeze. You have so much to say. No one piece needs to carry it all. Enjoy the process. Find out where each piece wants to go. Think, feel, and it all will change. Celebrate what you discover. Extend it. If you show up, and do the ugly work, out of the unknown something you want will emerge. It is a miracle, every time.