The Brilliance of Bite-Sized: Jane Davies on Learning and Goal Setting
This is part of the end of year advice series. Guests from the show offer suggestions on how to use an hour a day to get better at painting and share some of their own goals (and how they set them) for the year ahead.
Jane Davies is a full time artist working in collage, painting, and encaustic. She believes that making art is a journey with very few hand-holds and only a general road map. While she teaches a multitude of techniques, her personal artistic focus is on the back-and-forth play of spontaneity and intention that characterizes the creative process.
On an Hour a Day:
Wow, an hour a day, that would be great for an art student to be able to do.
First, I’d say to feel free to break it into two or three smaller sessions. And take two days off per week. I find sticking to an Every Day mandate difficult, and it is important to make this goal really DOABLE. Customize it to your own habits and tendencies, and choose a format that you WANT to stick with. This should be like a treat, not like a duty.
I personally love time-frame formatted art practices where the goal is simply to stay with it for the allotted time. No pressure to MAKE anything good. No pressure to finish anything or even to like what you are doing. Just showing up and engaging in the practice on a regular basis goes a LONG way to generating momentum and skill, and it allows you to cultivate your visual sensitivity.
“ALWAYS have the goal of simply showing up and engaging for the given period of time. Don’t set your goals in terms of finished products, finished pieces, ‘good’ art, etc. Those goals tend to do way more harm than good, and they are the leading causes of Getting Stuck.“
- Jane Davies
I think it almost doesn’t matter what kind of art you do or what materials you use in your allotted time. The important thing is to stay with it and pay attention. No mindless doodling or mindless anything.
Inspiration for your daily practice can come from anywhere - a new tool or a new color, a video, a book, images you saw on Instagram, a desire to just mess around and see what happens.
One thing that I do when I’m out of practice or out of ideas is this: take out a bunch of cheap drawing paper or bristol to use as substrates, and then limit your tools and materials. I might, for example, take out collage paper and a glue stick (or glue or matte medium), some fine micron pens, a few colors of paint markers (Posca Pens are my favorite), and let that be it. Collage and draw. And just do this continually, without hesitating and agonizing, for my one-hour or thirty-minute time slot.
Another practice I do is the thirty-minute mark-making. Usually I do this on larger paper or canvas, and I don’t limit the materials so much. Paint, draw, collage, etc, sometimes working on three 18x24 pieces at once, all tacked up to the wall. This is really fun, but it requires that you don’t TRY to finish the pieces or make them GOOD. Every time you hesitate, catch yourself and put a mark down. It’s more of a mental discipline than an art exercise, but it invariably leads to interesting surprises, and ’starts’ that you can work from.
For a beginner artist, I would suggest shorter sessions and limited tools and materials. Make marks with two or three colors of paint and pencil for ten minutes straight, for example, could be part of your hour. Another practice you could do on any given day would be color mixing - see how many different colors you can mix with three different reds, three different yellows, plus white and black, for example. It’s a great way to get to know your pigments.
In short, I would suggest if you had an hour a day to devote to your art practice, mix it up, but ALWAYS have the goal of simply showing up and engaging for the given period of time. Don’t set your goals in terms of finished products, finished pieces, ‘good’ art, etc. Those goals tend to do way more harm than good, and they are the leading causes of Getting Stuck.
Setting Art Goals:
I love looking ahead to the new year and setting goals or aspirations. I see my goals more as compasses - guiding principles- that inform how I move forward.
Some people advocate making your goals really specific so that you can measure when you’ve achieved them. Some aspirations will fit into that format. If I want to have more galleries representing my work (which is, actually a goal for 2021), I can set a goal of submitting work to X number of galleries. And then I can achieve that.
“I love looking ahead to the new year and setting goals or aspirations. I see my goals more as compasses - guiding principles- that inform how I move forward.” - Jane Davies
However, I don't make it a goal to have two more galleries by the end of the year. Those decisions are not all mine to make, and so I run the risk of failure. I really like to establish goals that CAN be accomplished. Here are some examples, besides the new galleries:
I want to earn more money on Fine Art America, selling prints and products. Yes, I have a target amount, but that is not important. The question is what can I do to establish circumstances under which I’m likely to sell more prints and products? I can upload more images more frequently; I can post about the availability of those prints and products more frequently on social media. I can include links to FAA in my regular newsletters. OK. Done. I can set a goal in terms of uploading, posting, and linking. I can do all of that. (Btw, that was one of my goals for 2020, and it worked! I did earn more than in 2019).
I want to paint larger and cultivate a clientele for larger pieces, including commissions for specific spaces. Truthfully, I don’t know how to do this, but I do know how to paint larger, and I’ve begun doing that. I learned how to stretch canvas, which gives me flexibility of size, and also offers logistical options in terms of transporting a work (paint on an unstretched canvas, transport to gallery or client, then stretch it on location). I can send portfolios to art consultants and galleries. I can create a print book (Blurb is a good platform, or Apple) of photos of larger works and send that to prospective consultants and galleries.
In general, I try to create my goals in terms of the things I do have control over. If I submit to fifteen galleries, and paint larger work and send images to galleries and consultants, then I have been successful. Even if I don’t get new galleries carrying my work or clients for larger scale paintings, I have laid some valuable groundwork, and I have begun to learn something about the process from the feedback I’ll get from the new contacts. Laying groundwork can feel like shooting in the dark, but it does begin a learning curve, a starting point.
Learn more about Jane Davies here:
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