Ease

I've been thinking a lot about ease lately.  

This year has been the antithesis of ease.  Mostly I do just fine, until suddenly I find that I am so very not fine.  Navigating the roller coaster is uncomfortable and difficult.  

Everything seems harder.

Over and over lately I've been repeating the question:  How can I make this easier? How can I make this easier?   How can I make this easier?   What am I doing wrong?   How can I make this easier?

Which begs the question: What is ease?  

For me, ease is the quality of a process that obtains maximum results for minimum effort.  

Maximum results.  Minimum effort.  

Five apricots.  Reference photo.

I'm at that stage in my creative process where I'm painting a lot of stuff that ends up in the dud pile, to be cut up and used for journaling pages later.  It's discouraging.  I'm trying to be focused so that I can use this time to learn, practice, and refine new skills.   But the duds keep coming.   

Piles of them.  

And in my mind the constant refrain:  Why is this so hard?   What am I doing wrong? What can I do to make it easier? 

I started examining my stories around ease.  I have familiar ones:

• Work is good. Good people work. If I work, then I am a good person.
• In order to be a good person, I have to work.
• The harder I work, the better person I am.
• I have achieved some awesome stuff by working hard. Therefore, great achievements only come after hard work.
• I am really good at making things harder. 
• I don't know how to make things easier.   

And I discovered some new ones:

• I feel like I have to MAKE things easier.  
• The more I control things, the easier they are.
• Control = ease.  Ease = control.

What if I changed things up a bit? 

Make it easier.

Make Let it be easier.

Let it be easier. 

Let it be.

What if ease is about letting things be instead of controlling them?

Honestly, I actually have no idea, at all, if that's true or not.

Five apricots.  Drawing.

I am all about the plan.  Getting a specific outcome.  

That requires control.   If I let go of control, I let go of the specific outcome.

New Question:  Is the point of ease to learn to let go of a specific outcome?  

I'm not so sure.

Is that the kind of doctor you want?   The kind of auto mechanic?  The kind of builder?  I don't think so.  Specific outcomes can be very important.

Maybe the point is to understand where it's important to have a plan and keep your eye on a specific outcome and where it's important to let it go and to work with the flow instead.

That feels much more a yin/yang thing, requiring judgment, intuition and balance. [That doesn't sound easy, but perhaps it does fit the requirement of maximum results for minimum effort.]

This begs new questions:  

• What am I doing that requires a specific outcome?  
• What requires flow?  
• What can I learn to just let be?
• What am I doing that needs to change categories? 
• To what extent does 'habit' contribute to ease?
• Is ease a function of one's ability to make something a habit?

Which brings me to art.  It's a perfect place to learn to go with the flow, especially since I'm a watercolorist and trying to literally 'go with the flow'. 

I can't seem to do it. 

There is So. Much. Pressure. to produce photorealistic art, regardless of your medium.  [Look at the gorgeous piece that took Best of Show at the Hoosier Salon:  https://hoosiersalon.org/portfolio/96th-annual-exhibition-2/] 

Photorealism is a specific outcome that requires a lot of planning and work.   Not a lot of flow.  

Even if I decided to shoot for impressionism or tonalism or some other -ism, that, too, is a specific outcome, which by extension, requires planning and work.

So again, I return to the questions:  How can I get maximum results for minimum effort?  How can I make this easier? --> How can I let this be easier? --> Should I just let this be? 

And that in turn begs another question:  What is it exactly that I am trying to make easier?  What is it exactly that I could possibly just let be? 

Am I trying to make each piece easier?

Am I trying to make the whole process easier? 

That last one especially resonated.  If I am trying to make the process easier, and the way to 'ease' is by letting it be, then the trick is to recognize what my process actually is and just flow with it.  Accept it; embrace it; go with it.  Even the hard parts.

Part of my process is the exploration phase.  It's the hardest part for me.  

And then this question shows up:  Why is it so hard - What makes it so hard?

Is it because exploration needs an element of play and I'm just not good at playing?

Is it because I am I trying to make myself/my art/my process something that I'm not/it's not? 

There are some big things that resonate for me here.  For the next while I'm going to be thinking about what makes a piece easier and what makes the process easier.   

What does 'ease' mean for you?

Even More Thoughts on Magic

This is another drawing from my class with Ian Roberts.  It's amazing how when you arrange a few lights and darks a certain way, suddenly a scene appears. 

Almost by magic.

I've been writing a lot about this kind of magic.  See my posts HERE and HERE. 

I realized as I looked through my work during the class, that there's still a big part of me that does not believe that I drew that. 

That part of me believes it must have been magic.   Some power outside of me that on a good day I can tap into, but not reliably, not regularly, not predictably. 

That was a surprise.  And then I reminded myself that it's not magic.  It's illusion.   

I got so caught up in the success of the illusion, that I bought into the 'magic' part of it too.  

Doing one of these a week for the next year is the best way I know to really internalize that these are reliable skills, not unpredictable magic bestowed and withdrawn at the whim of the Muses.  

  

Keeping it Simple

I'm taking a drawing class right now and for the next year will be doing a drawing a week like this one.

This time the reference photo was provided by the instructor, Ian Roberts and the exercise was in cropping.   The ref photo was a bigger scene of a French village.   

I'm pretty familiar with simple architecture and roof lines, but this piece gave me fits. I wasn't sure I could do it. I struggled. I fussed and fussed and fussed.  I made many disparaging remarks about French villages.  

In the end, I got the darks and lights in the right places and it looks as intended - like a French village.  

I learned more than drawing in this piece.   I learned that I can do more complicated, fussy compositions IF I remember to leave large areas very simple and to focus only on the details in the focal area.   

I have to keep repeating that to myself .   Keep it simple.  Keep it simple. 

I have a tendency to expect things to be hard.  Part of me wants them to be hard so that when I finally get it, it feels like a huge accomplishment - one deserving of a large reward.  [Which I never give myself, btw.]  It's how I prove my worth.  

However, over the years, this habit of doing hard things has been accompanied by a goodly amount of fear. I am always battling to prove myself. I'm always afraid that this time I won't be able to pull it off.

 

I need to stop.

I keep wondering if there's a way to make things easier and I think this is the key:  Keep it simple.  Keep the harder work just at the focal area.   

In this drawing class we spent a lot of time learning to intentionally focus on the important stuff and to intentionally simplify the rest. 

This is a strategy worth cultivating in many areas of my life.