#32 - How Far Are YOU Willing To Go To Create Optimal Conditions For Creating Art?
Are your surroundings conducive to making art?
Caravaggio lived before and was an inspiration to Rembrandt. He made these still-life paintings of fruit, giving each a different texture to brag about his skills.
One day, he broke part of a wall and ceiling in his apartment to get the perfect light from above on his still life, for which he naturally got in trouble with his landlord.
You don’t have to be as rigorous, of course. It can be small things:
1. Put your drawing tools within reach, and maybe put your gaming gear out of reach.
2. Put time limits on being on social media.
3. Plan in an immutable time in your schedule for making art.Jessica Abel has a great book, Growing Gills , and a course about getting into the creative process. One step is to clean your workspace. It is a part of your creative process to make sure the area where you work stays clean. It helps if you have a clean, tidy space to work. If you surround yourself with clutter, it tends to distract you subconsciously.
What changes do you make in your environment for your art?
As a challenge, try this today, or save it for a moment when you can’t bring yourself to draw: spend one hour cleaning up your workspace and see if it helps you create art after that. You will probably be able to be more focused while creating after that because clutter that surrounds you does tend to distract you.
Maybe there’s something to procrastinating after all!
And hey, if you don’t feel like cleaning your workspace, maybe start drawing instead!
Related
Growing Gills by Jessica Abel is a great book with practical suggestions on how to form a creative habit in your life. In this book, the also discusse cleaning your workspace as an activity that should be a part of your creative process. I can highly recommend her book and her course on the same subject.
Austin Kleon—of course— has a great blog post about creating a time or a place or both in our lives where we disconnect and just create. He calls it his Bliss Station which I think is a great name!