Hiatus over

Finished up with client work for a while so I'm free to start making personal art more consistently. Here's a recent finished thing along with a few false starts/ sketches I've been poking at over the past few weeks.

Recently I've been thinking more about studies and what purpose they serve in an artist's development. When I started out years ago I was somewhat ritualistic about studying. I did as many as possible, usually between working on larger paintings. The studies generally would be relevant to whatever idea I had for the next painting. If I wanted to try a desert background I'd study photos of deserts. I also did a lot of figure drawing and painting. I was always more interested in studying the human figure than anything else. 

However somewhere along the line I found that studying became more of a complacent habit than a real exploration. I began to do it out of an anxious feeling that I should "practice more", or that I should do it to "keep myself from going rusty". At the same time I found that studies had become very boring. I'd struggle to spend so much as an hour on one, and even as I did my mind would be preoccupied by a thousand different things. In this way it became very mechanical, and if I learnt anything from these studies it was very little. 

Looking back I think a large part of the issue was that once I'd got a steady job as a concept artist, the engine that drove me to develop my skill sort of ran out of juice. The reason I was so driven previously was because I was desperate to get some sort of gig in the industry. When I was at university I spent one summer doing shift work in a crisp factory down the road from my house. Working obscene hours in the sweltering heat of that factory with all those machines blaring around me, unloading box after box onto a conveyor belt as the hours crawled by at a snail's pace, it became starkly clear to me that I was not cut out for regular work. I had to paint. 

That very precise and pointed desire was the driving force behind all my "practice". It was all experimentation that had a clear goal in mind. Once I got my first studio job, that drive didn't entirely disappear, but it lost a lot of it's momentum. As a result, I ended up doing a lot of practice really just to avoid feeling lazy. 

This suggests that any practice that is not born of a deep and sincere desire to learn is really just a waste of time. It's just a reaction to anxiety. And the solution isn't to arbitrarily manufacture a goal in the hopes that that will rekindle your enthusiasm. A person really has to understand where they want to go ultimately. Once that is understood, the way develops itself. 

Nowadays my goal is much more to explore only what interests me genuinely. In hindsight it sounds obvious, but it's the only thing that really has the power to engage.