One of the books keeping company with me in the studio this invincible summer is Daily Rituals ... a collection of short essays on various creatives -- writers, painters, poets, scientists and musicians -- describing their work rituals, habits and idiosyncrasies. It's a very interesting little book, and a must-read for creatives. Naturally, it makes you look at your own life, and in my case, provides a bit of validation .... that great 'I'm not nearly as weird as I thought' feeling.
I certainly picked up some rituals from two years with Ben Long: out before sunrise for morning plein air work, back by the time the sun is too high for painting (when shadows go black), break from studio work around 2:00 or 3:00 for lunch, studio or plein air in the afternoons, don't even think about dinner till way after dark, and (my personal obsession) ALWAYS clean the studio before work. Ben managed best with an entourage, surrounded by chaos, but of course, nothing could be more distracting for me.
Today I'm arranging my ritual around a new goal: produce the little pet sketches in two days or less. If I'm going to be doing several of these a month, they need to be a quick hit ... a momentary pause in the production of more significant work. The one I'm doing today, Bubba the Pirate, is actually a bit larger, and I've already set up the composition on a 16x16 board. Finishing the whole piece today is pretty ambitious. But it's 8:30 now, and all the chores are done ... including food prep and Popcorn's daily swim. In fact, even if this experiment doesn't go as planned, I'll probably stick with the sunrise swim ... what a great place for morning coffee!
Photograph of Broad River race, Lockhart, SC ... with Popcorn.