Turn One Day at a Time... Into an 11 Year Art Practice
There are points in your life that can bring real clarity. That was the case for Lisa Daria Kennedy (Ep 14). Kennedy survived cancer as a young adult and realized she needed a change.
“I kind of sat around thinking of all the things I hadn't done,” says the artist.
Kennedy wanted a creative way to mark the passage of time. She looked to artists including John Evans who used the trash he collected each day to make a single collage.
Kennedy tried it as part of her daily beach walk. “I tried it for about one walk,” she says. “After about half of the walk, I thought, this isn't gonna work.”
This was 2009. Around the same time Kennedy saw bloggers starting to share their daily painting journeys and Kennedy decided to give that a try. She told herself she could try it for a year and blog under just her first and middle name (Lisa Daria) so that no one could find her if she didn’t like how it turned out.
That was over 4000 days ago.
The 1000th Painting
“What started off as a project that I thought maybe I’d do for a year, but I wasn't really sure if I'd make it that long, has turned into something that's been going on for 11 years,” says Kennedy.
But that doesn’t mean she got it right on the first try.
“I didn't really have a rhythm for a while of what I wanted to paint every single day.”
There were some things she knew. She knew she wanted to paint every single day. She chose to use acrylics because of their fast drying time. But she didn’t know what she wanted to paint.
Kennedy saw other artists online doing still lifes like glasses or paper bags everyday and while she liked their work, the subject matter didn’t resonate with her as a painting subject. She tried going to the market every day and finding things that inspired her but that took a lot of time and energy and didn’t feel sustainable.
“It wasn't until I decided to pick something that I could paint for a week that would have it's own start and stop date because you know, flowers, they live, they die, they live, they die,” says Kennedy.
As a subject, live flowers offered enough to keep her interested each week but also had a point where she would get new ones. They didn’t just offer a subject that interested her. They also offered a pattern and a habit she could fold into her daily painting and be sustainable for the long haul.
“So the beginning of the project wasn't as focused as it started to become around day 1000. So it took a while to get more into what I wanted, or what I thought that I wanted to paint.”
The Importance of Rules
Kennedy gave her project a framework or rules. She knew that if she wanted it to be a sustainable practice (And that’s what she sees it as, a daily practice.) She knew she couldn’t be making a thousand decisions each time she sat down to paint.
But the rules evolved.
When she first started the rules were somewhat simple: (1) paint every day and (2) paint in acrylics, and (3) use a limited palette.
Around day 1000 she discovered that painting live flowers purchased each week would be her subject matter and she also eventually realized that she needed to do it first thing in the morning.
Later in the process she realized that she didn’t need to be so literal in her interpretation of her subject.
The Freedom of Painting Daily
When Kennedy started the project, she wasn’t great at painting or very comfortable in acrylics. The daily aspect to the project was an incredibly useful way for her to get better at painting. It took pressure off a single painting and put the focus on learning to paint in general.
“I would paint a painting,” she says, “and I didn't think it came out so great. And then I thought, well, at least if I'm doing it tomorrow.”
But her daily painting practice also gives her other, larger work, freedom. It gives her permission to work in different ways.
“The bigger paintings wind up being opposite worlds,” she says of her work that uses hundreds of tubes of paint, is in oil and includes techniques like sanding.
But it also gives her a sense that she’s never too far away from painting in general. Because she isn’t.
“It provides this sort of a sense of calm because I work on bigger paintings in the studio during the rest of the day and I can't always get in there every single day,” she says. “But with the daily painting project, I'm always making time for that. I really can go into the studio and pick up a brush after a week or two and not feel like I have to start from zero again.”
Listen to Lisa Daria Kennedy on Episode 14 of the podcast. Click here to list.