Don’t blink, or you may miss it.  Keep your hand on the brush and your eye on the canvas at all times.  Never let your fingers wander from the true force.  Never let your mind waver before the blank face.  All things in the world must wait until you finish.  All chores in the day must pause until you arrive at the end of your work.

Your work is your art.  You are an artist–and it is your job to accomplish your craft.  But be aware there will be roadblocks and hurdles.  Distractions will constantly draw you back.

You must not give up.

Even if days, weeks, months–or years go by–get back to it.  Sometimes your heart takes breaks from what it loves the most–so that it may take less for granted in the long run.  Sometimes you have to take up writing, while your painting rests.  Sometimes you have to pick up the guitar, while your writing breaks.

Life is a fecund maelstrom, spinning about the axle of your creative spine–giving wings to your productive habits in organic phases.  People are puppets to their stages.  Use the seasons of your maturation wisely.  Plan well ahead, giving much cushion to the heavier projects.

Want to write a book?  Practice for ten years first.  Want to paint one masterpiece?  Paint a hundred to get warmed up.  Want to play one perfect song?  Play a host of horrible anthems alone, then go out and deliver the one maverick that broke through.

When you get tired of a discipline, pick up a fresh one–until the wellspring of your muse comes back again.  This way you will work your way up like a spiral, and produce more masterful art than you ever dreamed of doing–in less time than anyone could have ever thought possible.

People will ask how you did it, however, and you will have to answer, that you planned well ahead.  You will say that you knew that a plethora of practice almost always preceded accolades, and you didn’t want to take the risk that you might not get beginner’s luck, so you put your nose to the hard work.

These are our dreams, after all.  You and I share a common youth, where we imagined growing up to fill the shoes of those artists we so admired.  This is not frivolous wishfulness.  We did not spend those years dreaming just for fun.  We will not be forgotten as part of the fools who wish with their eyes closed.  We will not take our eyes off the focal length of our ages.

Every year you must re-assess where you’ve been–where you’re going–and what needs to change.  Every year something must change, because nobody ever gets it right the first or penultimate time.

We will pass through the illusory gates that have kept us from claiming our birthright to our inner artistic geniuses, like ghosts against the flow of time.  All unnecessary distractions will fall away from our daily routines.  Time will nearly stand still as we learn to cram in the practice, blowing months away in hypnotic passion over the stirring pots of our creations.

Then, when we re-emerge to see the work from the forest and the trees, we will surprise even ourselves with what we have done, as if someone from a different body had done it.  But it will be ours, and pride will become a hollow concept.  It will no longer seem like such a big thing.  We will see that the blueprint was within us the whole time, and it just took patience to grow.

We will finally remember all control is letting go, and that we have been strangling our own artistic souls by trying too hard.  We will remember that we already had it right long ago, as children–when we were more free to be creative.

Then, finally, we will see that art is not a dream to chase.  We got lost along the way, and confused success with the unattainable.  We confused art with something that was a gift–not a birthright to anybody who dared care about it.

People who say they could never do it, never even wanted to try.  Others who wanted to try, but didn’t–came to think falsely, that they weren’t good enough just the way they were.

Art is not the power of the few.   We are all masters-in-training, in the art of our lives–and a few of us decide to carry that skill-set over to the more obvious arts: painting, writing and music.  But everything beyond the pale of the commonly accepted arts is still art.

So stop waiting.  You’re the only one stopping you.  You didn’t miss the train to creation; you’ve been on it the entire time.  I am the conductor trying to wake you from your slumber–because you asked me to do it, when you started reading this.

Get back to the doodle you were doing.  Get on with the show you were filming.  Get over yourself.  Get under yourself.  Get to the end before the end gets you.

You’ve got one chance every single day of your life to make a good effort.  It happens the moment after you wake up.  Your first thought dictates how you will sleep.  Your sleep dictates how you will live.   Your life dictates how the future will turn out.

Fulfill your potential, by proving the possibilities. Give us the picture to a path pure in brilliance. Compose a song that will teach the generations what it means to feel music.

Nothing is impossible, even though we like to think so.

Stop listening to the naysayers, for they will walk on your grave when you fail.

Stop failing to act.  Perform for others if not for yourself, but do not dare spend another day away from your dreams.  Remember that conditioning will kick the habit of procrastination.

Remember why you loved to be creative in the first place, when you were young.  Release that awestruck quality once more.  Remember the joy in knowing you did something original, and why that was important to you.

Turn it over again.  Reinvigorate your gauges, and celebrate that the key to creativity has been found.  You will see later on that the door was unlocked all the while, but for now, take this lesson as a high warning: you will blink, and you will miss out on your dreams, if you don’t set up a schedule and stick to it.

Write down a list of all you want to do before you die.  Write every book or song title–or painting subject.  Write the chapter titles, to make it feel more real to you.  Write your obituary.  Write what your portfolio will look like at ninety-nine.  Get it all down, so you don’t forget a thing.

You are on tracks that wind around the mountain, and you don’t know if the bridge is out.  Stop waiting to live your life while you still can.  Don’t hold your breath for something more, when everybody actually needs less of what they already have.

Every day is an endless stream of distracted consciousness and action.  Shove it all aside.

Break the material things.  Shatter the baseless doubts.

Don’t deal too long with those who don’t understand your dreams.

You have a job to do.  Don’t let the day bury you.

You were sent here to be an artist.

Your chance is now.

While I like realism, I pursue it less, because I see more value in total originality.  It seems to me that, we should stray from the carbon copy footprints of Robert Bateman–and head into abstraction, whatever our subjects may be, in order to properly deliver the viewer from this realm–so that he or she will return to understand it better, having seen beneath the covers.

What I’m saying is, if you’re going to paint the scenery, why not take a photo?  Impressionism and the like aside, where you have some room for interpretation–a super-strict adherance to the details only begets one acclaim for the discipline, not the enlightenment.  When I observe a Bateman piece, I admire his skill–and marvel at his patience–but I never lose my mind, except perhaps in the inherent sublimity of the nature scenes–and the animals portraited.  I never grow wiser having been struck by some sub-layer of meaning–or some other trick of the artist that took me away from the real world.  Indeed, it is the opposite: I usually grow more clear about what the real world of nature really looks like.  But we all know the true power of art is in its ability to enlighten, by changing how we look at things–not reinforcing what we already see.  So realism is more like photography, in that it’s a snapshot of what’s around us–while abstraction is actually a funhouse mirror, letting us see our interiors in a different light.  So, furthermore, abstract is the true art.  It is the primary work that lifts the form above craft.  It is not paint-by-number; it is re-draw the lines.

Moreover, where this thought all began, was in consideration of how originality drives the abstract form.  It takes more creative gumption to make something out of nothing–and still make it good.  I don’t mean all realism is easier than all abstract art.  I mean, abstract art is harder to pull off at all–while realism is easy for the majority that take their time to learn the craft.  That is why there are so many shows about how to paint nature scenes.  Sure, there will always be somebody who will say they could never paint a nature scene, and that it was a tremendous gift.  But there are no shows teaching abstract art for a reason: it is far harder to accomplish well.  There is no template or blueprint, because abstract art is by its nature only good insofar as it is original.  The few shows that do purport to teach abstract are simply selling people a style.  So, what I’m saying is that there are fewer good abstract artists than there are good realists–however, the few abstract artists that are good–are very, very good.  Plus, next to their work–all of the pieces of realism in the world together pale in comparison.  Furthermore, on the other side, the majority of abstract art is actually very, very bad–and all taken together, can hardly stand tall next to one good piece of realism.

But what makes a work original? you may ask.  Even if it is accepted that the good abstract art is the more original art–and therefore the truer art–the question remains as to how the few good abstract artists that exist achieve their cathartic craft at all, without a map to follow.

The key seems to be studying your field deeply enough that you become familiar with every style and genre–until you begin to try to emulate some of your favourites, out of homage to them–and then eventually shatter them all, letting the shards reassemble themselves into something uniquely you.  Every detail should relate back to where your personally coming from, to be honest and unified–and then you will be assured of originality, and therefore guaranteed to satisfy at least one person: yourself.  You will love what you have made–and in turn, others will love the unity and honesty of message that allows them to see the world in your shoes for a change.

Finally, as an afterthought, it occurs to me that the reason there are fewer good abstract artists than good realists may be because we are living in a visual age.  The visual people are more susceptible to the highly visual media with which we interact–leaving them overdosed on the flickering lights–and disconnected from their inner landscapes.  It is harder for them to see inside themselves, so they default to realism–which more aptly fits their optic-centric modalities–leaving the good works of the abstract to kinetic oriented minority: those whose live more inside than outside themselves.

Those electrons of life winking in and out of existence randomly, without apparent cause, parallel our minds.  There are two things that remain mysteries to human beings: the universe and their brains.

Quantum Physicists have shown that our energy forces change the molecular structures around us.  The building blocks of the universe are basically empty of matter except for their thin shells and puny nuclei. Nothing is solid. Everything is fluid, gaseous and mutable. The composition of even stone can be manipulated by the mind.

In other words, our scientists still believe in magic–yet the artists still go largely unheard.

Art is a heightened channeling of common expression.  It allows the super-sensitive to offer role models to the thick-headed.  It turns the artist inside out–so that the artist’s inner aura washes the canvas of a grey world with waves of wonder.

Moreover, in the same way that words don’t really count in conversation, but tone matters more–true art is the purer path to ultimate communication.  Tone is more of a constant, whereas words get dodgy when they don’t quite add up.  Language is limited and flawed, and better reserved for more desperate matters needing resolution.  People know what you mean by a wink, a nudge–or a glare.  Even the way you hold yourself tells someone else about you.  Plus, our energy fields are always overlapping each other, influencing the celestial eddies, so-to-speak.

So, in art, we see the power of the raw human potential on display.  Artists are the parts as well as the whole.  They are the multi-verse as well as the Milky Way.  They are the improbable union of all things.

They are prophets and magicians in our midst–and we have grown to ignore them.

I say, if you want to make a statement with your life, then go for it. But if you’d rather remain neutral in time, and keep your statements inside, then do that instead.

To my mind, every action is an artistic expression. Some act out; some withdraw. Dada was fun. Theatre is great. I also admire J. D. Salinger’s incredible hording of his novels to himself. There’s room for all kinds.

For the purpose of these writings, however, it is important to note, that while having a physical audience is not necessary for making art, at least having an imaginary one always helps. Of course, this leads us right around to Dadaism, or art for art’s sake …

So let’s deal with the art for art’s sake perspective right away before anything gets misinterpreted. If you want to channel yourself into art for its own sake, like Dada did, or if you’d like to only make works for yourself, like Salinger—then that’s fine. The bottom line, however, is there’s usually some sort of audience of which to be aware while creating your pieces.

If instead you choose to believe there is no, or will ever be any, audience for your work, then there is no need to read on.

Unconditional Art is intended for people who want ideas or inspiration on how to make good art. ‘Good’ is a qualifier which requires something to measure against.

There has to be an audience to interpret the positive or negative value of a work. If your response is to say, ‘I determine if it’s good or not,’ then you are the audience.

Perhaps instead you would concede there is no value to your work, but it is merely what it is, without external validation required, to which I would applaud you, but question why you’re still reading this.

You have no business here, because your work is beyond perfect. It is beyond terrible. It has no limits. It is beyond us. Good-bye.

Now, if you’re still here, I take it you’ve concluded you have some audience, however small, and you are at least willing to embrace that belief for the remainder of our conversation here. So take that audience you have in mind and define it more clearly.

Turn the audience over. Do you know all of them? Do they all enjoy the same things? Will they laugh at the same times?

Who will walk out early?

Do you still respect them for it?

Who will cry? Who will wail? Who will heckle?

The more certain you are of your audience, the more quickly you will arrive at a completed product for them to consume. Don’t worry about narrowing your artistic freedom. You can change the make-up of the audience to suit your needs.

From the get-go, you can custom tailor them to be exactly the type of people who like the work you are trying to make.

Do not be afraid of your audience being too customized to you, and clouding your judgment: The mere imagining of an audience creates a divide from yourself. At the most suspect, you will be guilty of making gripping and thought-provoking works for people like yourself to enjoy. In the best case scenario, you will succeed at creating an audience so distinct from yourself, as to illuminate the world.

An audience can never be totally real, mind you (no pun intended). But with proper seeding and diligent care, fictional characters can come to approximate our impressions of real ones, and thereby fuel our work with Shakespearean circumspection.

Ultimately, however, they are still just figments of your mind. To one another we are merely card-board cut-outs …

Now, you may encounter a road-block here, of the chicken-and-egg scenario.

Those of you who previously preferred to deny having an audience, will hesitate at imagining what kind of one would like your work.

It will feel backwards to you, like somehow these imaginary people could come alive and spoil your creation with their poor taste. But remember, you made them, so make them have whatever sort of taste you wish, which will in turn engender the art you’re after.

But you might say, ‘I will make it, and whoever likes it likes it.’ Then again I ask you why you’re here?

If you want to make your work better, you have to know what’s bad about it, by polling your audience.

Asking yourself what’s bad about your work is ridiculous. Asking real people in the real world can be demoralizing and arbitrary.

Polling an imaginary audience, however, has the best of both worlds. Your audience will always have your best interests at heart, having been screened by your mind before offering their opinion.

Also, though, they will offer you some observations from the edges of criticism to which your raw ego might not have otherwise born witness.

I think everyone already has this imaginary audience. I think we use it every day in every way. It is a mosaic blasted from the fabric of history; A patch-work of personalities we have met along the days.

It exists as a tool to guide us.

For our purposes here, it will be herein coined Our Audience, because it is the only thing we share. We are each just each other’s thoughts. We can’t say for sure that we share the same reality, because there is no We—only I’s, but we share as much reality as an author does to her characters.

Also, we share the fact that we each have an audience—which is, of course, each other.

Furthermore, we have in common that Our Audience cheers us on, or condemns us—but in both cases, they are still the puppets of our consciousnesses.

We are the instigators of our obstacles.

Those who forget this lose their free will.

Those who remember it too well grow overwhelmed and end up wallowing in excessive self-sabotage.

So now you’ve born witness to Our Audience, and we’ve established that Our Audience is at the very least a little different than ourselves—whatever work we make for them will be a little different than we would have merely made for ourselves.

Furthermore, we know Our Audience values how we translate them into the world, for without us they do not exist. So we should work hard to portray them accurately. For by reading our work, real people will subconsciously imagine Our Audience, so imagining it yourself first before they do should be considered.

To be clear, Our Audience is all characters perceived to be real or imaginary. We are Our Audience, and we witness our works—and while we do so, we imagine the others in the audience with us.

You see this in everyday life. For instance, everybody has a different sense of humour, but when an odd man out bursts into laughter, everyone can’t help but wonder what’s so funny.

But to him it couldn’t be clearer. Characters inside of him are rioting with glee and clamour. He is imagining what dead friends would have said. He is giggling at what past souls, or those not present would have bellowed out.

He can’t help but ponder on how old so-and-so would have roared the lights out.

He’s laughing at something people he knew would find funny, and with whom he once learned to appreciate the form of humour in the first place.

Comedy is curious this way it is relative, and we could laugh at just about anything if we wanted, if we thought about it. But so is tragedy. It’s all a part of drama. The laughing man could just as easily have cried—or killed himself.

Or won the lady’s heart. Or slew the beast of addiction.

Or crushed the lords of starvation.

Again, the reason the crying man doesn’t switch into light by simply deciding to laugh, is that decisions like that become hopeless, and learned helplessness sets in, and free will plummets. But grab the controls quick, for forgetting Our Audience causes this sort of languishing–and it most easily abates when washed with confidence.

So, as we might have predicted, better knowing Our Audience gives us control over our art and destiny. Plus, while Our Audience may not be the same for you and me, at least we can agree we share the fact that we both have one–and leave that debate behind.

So march on with your plans, but every once in awhile, take a moment now to look over your shoulder, and consider for whom you’re living?

Just for yourself?Are you sure?

Is it for family? Friends? Lovers? Strangers?

Which ones?

Acquaintances? Echoes? Mirages?

Sheep?

The depthless?

Pick your noun, but then go on to qualify it. The more real it is, the more real will be your art—and your life.

In fact, I would go on to say that art and life are never more real than the shadow of Our Audience will allow us.

Our Audience is the source of us. This is why dreams are so rich, when waking life is such a drag. We are just reflections of our real selves.

We are consciousnesses pretending to be real people. When we sleep, we wake up in the prototypical realm, where the types we were cast from exist in permanence. In that realm, everything is effortless. There, there is no cloud between the will and the won’t.

But here, every piece of chess moves carefully, often tripping up—never seamlessly advancing toward victory, but always progressing in an ebb and flow that climaxes and fizzles out like any story. But these stories can be stream-lined, if we just keep an eye on Our Audience.

Could we have the house lights please?

Before I ramble on more about art, I would like to take a side-road into the terrain of creation altogether.

Some might ask, Why are you so hung up on art? Stop taking yourself so seriously.

They would be right. My response is I can’t stop myself. I find art addictive. But it is definitely a lot to do with stress, and I recognize that because I’m sensitive, and meditation is so beneficial to my disposition, so too is art.

So maybe art’s not for everyone. Maybe those more relaxed sorts are happier without it. That’s okay too, though, because someone needs to be the audience.

This all being established, however, it’s not so simple.

Relaxation isn’t my only driving force. I make art to compete as well. Not with others, of course, if I can help it, but mainly with myself, trying to perfect past projects, making new ones the most beautiful yet.

The satisfaction of the journey and the end work are equally marvelous.

It requires thought to figure out how to climb out of the box you were born in. There are levels of genres of categories to transcend, and mosaics of philosophy and wisdom to traverse.

You have to re-imagine yourself constantly, in order to not get trapped by people stereotyping your style, expecting you to re-produce yesterday’s projects like a mule. This is the only way from growing stale, but you must be careful not to mis-imagine yourself.

You will always run the risk of becoming a shadow of your past, a photocopy cast through the veils of time. For in life, the important thing along the way is to make better days for ourselves, and that can be helped by art.

If you mis-imagine your life into a corner for a myriad of shallow reasons, your art will only drag you down, just as art which misrepresents your true feelings drags you down.

Real art, however, will teach you how to live, because it is just like life.

The same principles of making good art can be applied to life as well. For instance, I always make a project with some audience in mind. Whether I care to admit it or not, my idea of good art is art that is gripping and thought-provoking, so I do keep that in mind during my process of creation.

So therefore I have recognized, if I formulate a plan for my daily life, it is best to keep an audience in mind. (I know here some will balk at the suggestion that I do things with other people in mind. It is apparently taboo to live your life by anybody else’s rules anymore. This is why everybody’s single or headed that way, because we all think we’re so independent, but the truth is, we’re in denial, because our most basic nature is being social.)

We really wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for each other, and so it stands to reason we look out for each other.

I found out the truth is, we’re all altruistic. We just want to please people, and be liked.

An agent’s questionnaire asked me, Who do you write for?

I wrote that I write for Other people.

The next question read: What do you want from this critique?

Another opinion, I replied.

If no one else existed, would I still write? I’m not sure I would even have a language, let alone write. Language is intertwined with life-forms like us, separate ones that think together.

I guess I do read my own work occasionally after it is written, but it is still as the writer. I’m still thinking of ways to make it better. I’m not enjoying it purely for the entertainment or enlightenment, although I try to let these things in.

So anyway, I live life like I write, or paint—or play music—and it feels good, it helps. The tenets of my personal taste for art may happily spill over into my waking life, because I still believe in all of it, no matter whether we’re talking about reality or ideas.

For me then, art can be therapeutic, and a tool for entertaining others. But there’s more …

I’ve always wanted to live forever. My parents don’t want to, and I know a lot who don’t—but I always did. Just like some people think ideas are scarce and life gets boring, others find ideas come cheap, and accomplishment is challenging.

Me I always feel close to mastering something I can never put my finger on, certain it’s better than yesterday, but at times needing to take a break, and other times to burst into sprint like all hell for the finish line of some self-affirming art or life project.

I feel like a hundred years is not enough. A thousand would only whet the appetite. A million would be nice, but infinity (always with the option out)–would be best.

I need time to explore all the neurons firing inside. It could take eternity. I knock my skull just once, and fireworks are cracking long into the night.

I study one thing carefully, the whole time tripping around the world between blinks. The imagination pours in at every seam. It must be purged.

So art is a portal to immortality too.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Others have similarly varied reasons for making art. Sometimes it’s for better reasons than mine.

Sometimes it’s to woo someone, or to stay on drugs. There’s a hundred muses for every fool.

Before we go on then, let’s get it straight. We’re not talking about doing art for your sake. You have your reasons, and you can keep them. You’ve bared witness to them, and they are yours. They won’t help anyone else, and so there’s no need in sharing why you write or paint or play.

For the purpose of my discussion here, we’re talking about art for others. This is an easy way of trimming back to the basics, and revealing the essentials of good art. It allows us to focus on just what makes hearts flutter and heads spin.

What is it that makes a work gripping and thought-provoking?

Once we clarify the answer for ourselves, and pursue it, our work will become gripping and thought-provoking, and people will begin to pick it up and enjoy it, and we will finally feel acknowledged by our peers for our craft, instead of incited to snobbery for their previous lack of seeing talent in us.

Some of us, mind you, will hold on to that snobbery long after we’ve become acknowledged, and god bless us for not forgetting how hard this world makes it on artists. A long time ago, we were revered and respected, but in a time that values worker ants of tunnel vision, we have become dangerous beacons of freedom’s light..

Anyway, by keeping an eye on creations growing up to become gripping and thought-provoking, we are ensuring that they do so, and leading good works.

Likewise, if we live our days in our minds’ eyes with imaginary audiences always watching us, and we learn to focus our moments on what’s gripping and thought-provoking, to draw cheers or applause from them, we will inevitably begin to live more gripping and thought-provoking lives.

Thus, from here on in, knowing the same tools you use to make art, make your life, you can cross-reference these different crafts, and draw a new synergistic energy from their mix, in order to reinvigorate your days full of heart–and deeds artful.

So once again now, we shall continue talking about what it takes to make good art, but always keep in mind, I’m not addressing the reasons why you make the art for yourself, but only why you make it for others.

Also, please keep in mind these same principles will later propel your life.

Once you’ve finished a good body of work you may hit a plateau and wonder where to go next. This usually happens when you feel you’ve out-paced the competition and already met all of your own personal expectations.

This is when the bar’s imperative rise rolls in. You must only challenge yourself to do better than yourself, and no one else. If you look to others for a yard-stick to measure your own artistic merit, you will always find those who are less skilled than you, and too easily gain an egoistic gall about your own certain talent and fame.

When we seek solely to improve upon our past accomplishments, we will always feel compelled to work harder—to keep the failures at bay, so to speak. In other words, you’re only as good as your last virtuoso—so you’d better make it another good one before too long.

Another reason to constantly challenge yourself, is your audience is always changing, and you can never count on the loyalty of a painter’s groupies anymore. One way I like to look at it is I’m always a different painter doing a different style, for every piece. This helps me appeal to critics more widely, while always having the freedom to do much better or much worse than I did yesterday.

So stay loose with your craft. Don’t paint yourself into a corner stylistically, or run out of ideas prematurely. Take chances and be brave. The world is full of new concepts. Every moment of thought is a sonnet. Make every piece count. Pour something special into every canvas. Maybe this time it’s only in that you’ve tried a different stroke, or next time you’ve used more yellow.

Once again, art isn’t about the masterpieces. The masterpieces are the desserts. Let’s get through all five courses first. Let’s cherish every morsel of ingenuity for what it’s worth. Let’s dare to challenge every cursed preconception we may carry. Let’s learn to astonish each other with marvelous re-framings every-time without delay.

Let’s become the best versions of ourselves we’ve every imagined. Everyday is a quantum leap or an entropic catastrophe. The spirits of the universe defy natural law by granting someone genius one day and inferiority the next. There is no equation which will guarantee you what you will be tomorrow. So therefore there is hope.

The next time you walk by your blank canvas, where your brush and paint are already set up for you, and you are confident with the art of completion—take that extra breath and question a new path down which none you’ve ever known have ever gone.

Then go down it. Pull out every trick in your bag. Shine your lights and dazzle the eyes. Breath much. Know that later you can choke, but for the moment you must bend to the forces pulling you. You must follow through weaving this new tangent. You must not think. You must not consider.

You must draw on every accomplishment and relationship you’ve ever had and infuse them all into one piece. You must crack the world in half with your consciousness. Throw down your kiddie gloves.

Let’s see who you’ve been trying to be all this time.

If you watch a fly, it’s always rubbing its legs together, as it were hatching some master plan, but nothing ever comes of it. The fly always ends up flying away, just when you’d think a climax would take.

Spiders, on the other end, while running their silk, show us constant proof of their productivity, and so therefore, whenever you see an arachnid walk in the room, you always expect some web will follow.

So here you sit before a blank page and your imagination fails you. It is not enough that you’ve set your tools out ahead of time, but now that you’ve finally found your moment and seized it, the demons of self-sabotage are rearing their ugly visages.

At first it seems there are too many options, too many avenues down which to trod, and you can hardly make up your mind which one to pursue, or you try to track them all, and they collide in the process.

Subsequently, caught in a state between not beginning, and not wanting to walk away, you begin to lose focus on all of those brilliant ideas that made you sit down in the first place, and you soon come to experience painter’s block.

Art executed well always seems effortless, but creativity is no mean feat. Being original is as fine a balance as you will find in life, and it takes a truly circumspect spirit to deem itself unique. This having been said, however, there is a limited science one can follow to engender their own inspired pieces.

Firstly, once you begin, thinking ends.

There is no or little room for ponderance once a plan is put in motion. The roots of creation are so deep and strong, once the seeds of art are planted, our only responsibility is to water them and watch them grow.

Choices are made along the way, about how much light and shade to allow for, how much feed is necessary along the way—and when to harvest for maximum ripeness. Ultimately, however, art that is fed by the subconscious comes whole, and it is our duty simply to unfold it.

Now after you’ve plowed ahead for a goodly amount of time, you may want to break as necessary, but returning from time away, always reacquaint yourself with the energy of that former momentum, in order to carry forth to the work’s denouement in a fittingly similar fashion, so as not to hamper unity and symmetry.

Now, finally, you have come to the end of a piece, and for all accounts, it is a decent craft, simply because you have completed it.   But there is always editing to follow.

For writers it is called re-writing. For musicians it’s called band practice.

For acrylic painter’s it’s called layering. Now, here I leave oil painters out of the picture, as their entire medium is known for it’s ability to meld composites of their best strokes.

In acrylics and water-colours, however, with such a short drying time (mere minutes for thin washes), there is little room for traditional reworking, as in the other art forms, whereby entire sections are simply replaced with more perfect versions.

In acrylics and water-colours, you only get one run.

Afterward, you can always add layers to increase visual complexity, but if you have any one section you are particularly displeased with, you have lost the race.

This is why I advise you to finish what you’ve started: With unity, comes the strength a cohesive vision instills in its subsequent layering. Suddenly, your second layer is no longer relegated to fixing mistakes, but simply to smoothing minor glitches, and amplifying happy accidents.

Then, by extending this same strict richness inherent in acrylic work toward a unified and quickly completed creation to all of your other mediums, you will increase your efficiency and mastery in them tenfold.

Another reason people don’t end what they’ve begun is they don’t have the next project in mind. This is common amongst amateur or hobby artists, because they haven’t allowed themselves, or don’t want, the freedom to dream big.

Dreams allow us to see things on the horizon you couldn’t normally discern with the naked eye.

Therefore, when dreamers feel like they’re missing out on grander prizes in the distance, it will look as if they are acting irrationally, often babbling incoherently and making decisions with disregard for their present circumstances, but they are simply trying to finish their tasks at hand more efficiently, in order to sooner set out on their more critically self-defining quests.

So, if you aren’t rounding out a task, or topping off a topper. If you haven’t yet finished that story or book, song or album—or painting piece or series … it is because you are prematurely working on your ultimate masterpiece.

What I mean is, the only way we can shoulder the imperfections of creation along the way, is by holding the end vision in our minds so strongly the unity of a piece draws out its own spirit. For we are all solely in competition with ourselves, such temporal beings, striving just to do better than before, and whatever we create along the way can only be truly imperfect versions of what is yet to come.

So if you have not yet thought of what is yet to come, then you must be working on your last project, and therefore your masterpiece. This is why masterpieces are so difficult: They must represent enough substance for us to die or retire on.

In clearer terms, amateurs, hobbyists, and newcomers to the sport of art, who wish to know why they can’t finish some work they’ve started, need only to look to the fact that they are too new at this game to claim theirs is of the finest in its creation.

So, therefore, instead of choking on painter’s block, they should instead rather expect imperfections, as they are the hallmarks of early art by eager artists. They should learn to rely more on unity and completion in their early art careers. It is where creative wings are spread and rusty artsy neurons are first fired, pioneering new fields for the mediums to later on more accurately navigate.

Today’s society, however, frowns upon artists. If they are good, we call them talented and lucky. We don’t usually attribute hard work and persistence to their success. Therefore, when some of us try to cross that tenuous line into becoming an artist, we often recoil at the first signs of failure, judging them to be indicative of our inevitable lackluster success in the field as a whole.

We think so little of art itself as a practiced skill, in fact, that we imagine if the talent isn’t immediately obvious on us, it must not be there. So then, in consequence, we self-sabotage the works, and fail to finish the projects—giving up just when things were looking good, because we were no longer caught in our creative stale-mates.

Then we go back to our lives and complain about never finishing any art we started—claiming we just aren’t talented, when in fact we just never realized, if we’d let ourselves dream bigger, instead of being so conservatively reserved about our artistic ambitions that we were without room for error–we would have finished more along the way, than if we’d spent a lifetime trying to be modestly capable.

So when perspectives toward completion look bleak, throw yourself in headlong and don’t stop until you hit bottom. You can always go back later and layer a little more, or make another pass toward perfection. Then if along the way, things ever seem as though they are coming apart at the seams, just remember, loose strands are merely reminders that you’re weaving a web at all.

So what are you? Fly or spider?

Some people treat their paint brushes like porcelain. They have deep-seated fears that, as the fine hairs of their brushes slowly wear down, their strokes become less inspired. This is true, yet I myself learned the hard way that you can make due with what you have for a very long time. If the talent is in you, you could paint pigment on rock and people would like it.

I leave my brushes at my easel in a jar of clean water. This is the water I will use next time I feel inspired. The water erodes the brush hairs, but long ago I decided it was more important the tools were always present—in as close a set-up as can be to what I’ll need when I’m ready to go for it. Otherwise the moment is lost, and you will never be a painter.

The water in my jar makes my brushes fray, slowly eroding them. In desperate times, however, I’ve painted personal masterpieces with such wimpy brushes you’d be astonished. Also, being aware my brushes are slowly being eaten by the water has at times acted like a timer on me, egging me on to once again … paint!
I leave a blank canvas on my easel and I am set to go whenever the mood calls.

My easel is a chair. You can use whatever easel you wish. I use chairs because my studio is full of them. People are shocked all of the chairs are covered from years of paint. The chairs were garbage though, long ago, and so they are not a waste, but a beautiful makeover.

I also enjoy the shock value.

I did have a nice easel once, but I lost it in the infamous Black Lab fiasco (see bio).

Where do you paint? You should have an answer by now. If you don’t, all of your stuff’s in a corner, box, closet—or under your bed. In that case, skip to Perspectives On Completion before reading further.

How often you paint also depends on how well you paint.

This is exemplified by the great inspiration a successful painting manifests in the artist. The artist wants to get right back at it, and do’er again. The problem with this is the Xerox effect. Eventually your pieces will suffer if you plough on. The best bet is to rest, or change forms (see Unconditional Art: Renaissance of Consciousness).

So always have the tools at hand, but after you’ve drained your imagination, force yourself to get away from it. Spend some time setting up the station for next time, but do no more creating.

Along with a chair, canvas, jar of water and brushes of several sizes, I also always have fresh tubes of paint ready to squeeze. I am purposefully wasteful of my paint, treating it as if it were water. For instance, I always over-squeeze my paint. This way I know my paintings will never suffer from lack of colour (which can happen during times of paint conservation), but also, I know the paint isn’t going to waste (as my chairs themselves become works of art).

Your tools use you.

Your job is not to go finding every tool once you’ve been inspired. By then your tools will have bored of you. By then you’ll lose focus and either not paint at all, or paint poorly like a deflated bag of blandness. Don’t let this happen. Refuse to identify yourself as a painter unless you know, at home right now, your station is just the way you’d have it if you only had a nano-second’s blank page epiphany left to seize.