It can be hard work to establish a pattern of regularly working on your own creative project. Daily lives are huge distractions and starting out to establish a rhythm of working again and again on your creative interests is difficult not only because of the organisation, motivation, commitment and practical arrangements this necessitates but also because you need to push other positions in your daily or weekly schedules aside to make space. I find that it is harder to establish a new habit of working on something than it is to maintain a practice that I have already established. I compare my artmaking a lot with other activities in my life that I like to do, e.g. playing guitar or going out for a bike ride. On a Saturday morning I go on a bike ride. On Tuesday night, I join my band mates for music rehearsals. In the absence of external circumstances, e.g. dates to work with other people or joining a class where you have committed to book your place, there is less requirement to adhere to your plan to show up and work. When working on your own, setting your on schedule for when such work happens and where is difficult. Yet, this kind of independent work that you might do all on your own follows your own interests, develops your personal, unique artmaking skills and builds your confidence. I suggest that you consider the following idea when you are starting out to develop your own arts practice: make it easy for yourself! Choose to do practical work that is not too difficult, that you might already know how to do, and of which you know that you like doing it. Don’t aim high with expectations for outcomes (we are our best enemies when it comes to aiming too high, for goals that are - realistically seen - too far way), but aim for a regular return to your desk. If you want - as a goal for your whole practice - to engage with the landscape of a certain valley - don’t demand of yourself to paint a full on picture in your first sitting. You might just start to sort out your paints, and make tests of the paints you got, spots of paint on paper…. Don’t aim and plan for three hour sessions - they may require a huge reshuffling of other daily schedules - start with 10 minutes of sitting down. Making it easy for yourself and lowering expectations will take the pressure out of your next practical session. Aiming for a short amount of time to be spent working - and then maybe staying longer, because it was easy to do - works well to establish a temporal pattern of working creatively. What matters most at this stage is that you return to your desk. Admittedly, it can be challenging to know what alternatives to your big goals you might have to establish your practice. The less familiar you are with the practical whereabouts of your creative interest, the more difficult it might be to understand what alternatives you might have to work, the alternatives to the big-goal-approach. It is always helpful to seek out communication with other people, talk to them about your work, and the problems you encounter; other artists have exactly these kind of issues too!
