Run Far, Far Away From The Comfort Zone
September 29th, 2009
I have been painting a lot lately. I mean ten or twelve hours a day, sometimes without much of a break at all until I realize I’ve missed dinner.
This is what I mean when I say I’m a binge worker. The same thing happened while I was writing and editing Summeryear before I fell into that unfortunate slump. But the slump served one good purpose, it forced me to either be productive in something or become depressed and mopey for getting nothing done. Luckily, I chose to do something.
And so I pulled out an old painting I had started a few months ago and have now nearly finished it. That’s Suntamer, if you’ve been keeping up with my news lately.
Suntamer scared me a little. Well, no, it scared me a hell of a lot. It’s substantially outside my artistic comfort zone. I’m used to doing fairly simple portraits which, while they have certainly gotten better over the years, have remained just as dull and unimaginative.
So I had started Suntamer. It’s a figure of a woman holding a phoenix. Not looking straight ahead blankly, not with no real degree of actual design involved. I am tired of just painting faces, and I doubt I will again for a long time now that I’ve started experimenting.
While I was taking a break from Suntamer tonight, I sketched up this:
I am going to paint this. I don’t care how freakin’ long it takes, how much I want to gouge my eyes out by the end or if my tablet pen erodes down to nothing but an eraser sized lump. I am going to paint this.
We’ll see how it goes, I suppose. For the time being I’m still working on Suntamer, two art trades with two of my best friends which won’t be quite as detailed (probably) as Suntamer, and thus shouldn’t take months to complete like this has.
I think this is important. Just as important, maybe, as having decided that one day so long ago to sit my ass down and write a novel, and then actually doing it. This is my novel in digital painting, it’s my mountain to climb, a be-all-end-all test of how serious I am about art and getting better at artsy things.
Funny thing is, I said the same thing about Suntamer and now that it’s almost finished I feel I could have found a higher Everest. So, here we go. I expect this piece (calling it Zaxamara Stone for now) will have the same feeling once it’s done. Just the nature of improving.
And so the thoughty in today’s thoughty gobbet is this… do not believe in comfort zones. They are simply cages. Experiment more. In whatever artistic endeavor you feel connected to – experiment more.
That’s all.
Cheers.
