1898 Map Showing the Mansion

This map from 1898 shows Whitman Hall when it was still in private hands. It would become the Waltham Country Club in 1921, then be bought by the school during the Depression. The mansion is unlabled, but if you look to the far left of the map about halfway up, you may recognize Whitman Hall. It’s unclear from this map, but the building just above and to the left of Whitman appears to be the carriage house (now the foundry.)

Boston Design School: Making and Keeping Habits from Don MacDonald on Vimeo.

In this one I talk about creating a daily routine, thinking of making art like exercising, the BIC technique, and not waiting for the perfect conditions for making art.

Transcript and recommended reading below the fold:

Transcript:

Hi and welcome to the one where I talk about making and keeping habits. Now if you’ve done any amount of artwork or creative work you know how tough it can be to keep at it; how easy it is to lapse into inactivity and find out that a week has gone by and you haven’t done any drawing. The question is: how do you prevent that from happening? How do you keep yourself working every day?

Unfortunately there is no easy answer. You really have to work it out for yourself, but one of the key things is to make a habit out of it. That’s really the most important thing. To make a habit out of every day going to your studio—and you should have a studio of some sort, even if it’s just a spot in your living room—that’s set aside for the specific purpose of making art. And you should make a routine—a ritual—that gets you to that place every day. For me, it’s making a coffee after the kids are in bed and I come on down to my studio and that’s what gets me started. It’s something you should do every day and not just when inspiration strikes. Inspiration will strike, but you can’t wait for it. Picasso said “Inspiration will strike, but it usually finds you working.” And what he means is that inspiration strikes more often than not when you’re sitting down and hammering away at something.

Even if you feel you have nothing to draw, you should still come on down as part of your daily exercise to draw something, draw anything, it doesn’t matter what. It helps if you think of it that way: as a kind of exercise for your art, for your muscle memory of drawing. Because you will get rusty if you neglect it if you don’t work for a number of days or weeks: it’s not like riding a bike—you do get a little rusty. I mean, you never quite forget, but still, you’ll find things have slowed down a bit for you and you’ll need some time to get back up to speed, back to the place where you left off. So think of it like exercise, you do it each day and it keeps you sharp. And whether or not you go down to the studio with a specific idea of what you’re going to do that day is not important; you go down and you draw something. Draw from life, copy a picture, if you’re not in the middle of a big project do whatever you want.

One of the  techniques I find that works best for me is what a lot of people call the “butt-in-chair” technique,: which is that you just tell yourself I’m going to head on down to the studio and I don’t need to draw. But I can’t do anything else. I either draw or I stare at the wall for an hour (or however much time you have set aside.) And you’ll find actually you can get a lot more done in even a half-hour—if you work every day—than you expect. It will surprise you. But the point of the BIC technique is you either draw or you stare at the wall, but you stay in that chair. You don’t have to draw or paint or write or whatever it is you do, but if you don’t you are going to have to sort of sit there and do nothing. You’ll find you generally end up choosing to work.

Another trap that people fall into is that of waiting for the perfect conditions. When you don’t have a good studio, when you’re not feeling that great…the perfect conditions will never come along, so don’t wait for them. Don’t think about them. They’re not going to happen. Well… sometime things are going really great, you’ve got a really great setup and everything, but generally not: there’s always something, there’s always some excuse you can make and that’s usually all it is, that’s all these imperfect conditions are, they’re just an excuse not to work.

So in terms of making a habit make a promise to yourself to work each day, make a ritual out of it, and treat it like exercise and don’t worry about whatever it is you have to draw that day. I think people tend to worry too much: “I can’t draw today because I have no good ideas.” Don’t worry about good ideas: they’ll come. Do your daily exercise and the ideas will come to you.

Recommended Reading:

Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit. (Simon & Schuster 2005)

David Bayles & Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. Image Continuum 2001)

Boston Design School: Introduction from Don MacDonald on Vimeo.

DM