Addressing Your Inner Critic

At Art and Soul this fall in Virginia Beach, most of my workshops are geared towards addressing your Inner Critic - you know, that voice that infuses your art practice with doubt, and saps you of confidence.  There is no question that making art involves a certain amount of angst, effort, resistance, frustration, and other emotions that accompany activities that are ultimately compelling and fulfilling.  For me, the key is to make some kind of peace with these and to align my expectations with What Really Happens In The Studio rather than what I think should happen.  Some of the exercises I do in workshops are particularly suited to this; they seem to get people moving, unstuck, and having fun making art.  This is just one such exercise: Speed Painting. This is an unedited, though short, video of me demonstrating Painting the Paper in Twenty Seconds, then drawing into it and taking prints off of it.

We will be doing this, and other such exercises in Art Therapy for your Inner Critic, Big Fat Art, and a version of it in Drawing Blind. 

On this one I began by making marks with graphite before doing the speed painting and lifting.

This is one of the "prints" pulled from the speed painting.  Ditto the next two.

The process makes a LOT of interesting starting points for further painting and drawing. Stay tuned, and I'll post these again after I've worked on them.

See all my Virginia Beach workshop offerings, October 1 - 3, here.
See all of the Art and Soul Virginia Beach offerings here.