“Try things against your grain to find out just what your grain really is.”
“You are always the student in a one-person art school. You are also the teacher of that class.”
“Vermeer found a life’s work in the corner of a room.”
Irwin Greenberg, The Painter’s Primer
There are 97 other tips in the primer linked above, a list that was apparently distributed to students of the Art Students League of New York. These three resonated with me in particular.
Another sounded very familiar:
“Never say I can’t. It closes the door to potential development.”.
I generally say: “Add the word ‘yet’. Say ‘I can’t, yet’.”
May 2019 be a year filled with creative joy for you, with moments where ‘I can’t, yet’ becomes ‘I can, now’.
When a student would say, “I can’t do this,” I would tell her or him that word wasn’t allowed in my classroom. Worked every time. Make yourself a little sign to keep in front of you when you are painting that says, “I THINK I CAN, I KNOW I CAN, I DID IT.” Two of my favorite quotes by Edgar Degas: ” Painting is easy for those that do not know how, but very difficult for those that do, ” and “Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things”.
I do like those quotes Jim! Together they really do sum it up — it’s hard because you know what it entails, but the best things come when we are able to forget what we know we can do.