Inspiration Fridays! There’s fun, and then there is type 2 fun.

There’s fun, and then there is type 2 fun.

Fun is floating on your back in the salty Caribbean Ocean, then standing up with the water waist high and walking to the sandy shore for a cold beer. It’s snuggling kittens and scooter rides through the jungle.

“Art comes from joy and pain…But mostly from pain.” – Edvard Munch

Type 2 fun hits different. It’s regaling your friends with the story of how you ran through the airport at full speed with your dad bouncing in a wheelchair so you could make your connection seconds before the gates closed. Type 2 fun doesn’t feel fun at the time. In fact, it can feel just the opposite. It can feel painful or scary. Type 2 fun is crap in the moment.

But long after your plane leaves the tarmac, and the flight attendant explains how to inflate a life vest, it’s this type of fun that makes for the best stories. Type 2 stays with us in our memories. We’ve all snuggled a kitten, but have you ever seen a wheelchair bounce? My dad finds this last bit hilarious.

Type 2 fun is Painting. Sure! There are days when painting is fun. All the colors land, the composition comes out great. Maybe you even managed your friends likeness on the first try. But those days can be few and far between.

 

8paint Inspiration Fridays! There’s fun, and then there is type 2 fun.

Motorcyclist in the Dominican Republic

What about the days when all of your colors turn to mud? You’ve transformed your best friend’s beautiful face into a spot on likeness of their dog, and you can’t even get the damned cap off your tube of Paynes gray?  Why do we do it? Why do we keep coming back to something that is so hard? Something that keeps us up at night with our head spinning, and can cost us more in art supplies then we get back in a year? This is Type 2 fun.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge believer in the process. It’s the act of painting that gives me that electricity. And I am in love with the feeling that I get when I am in the flow state. But sometimes when I am falling flat on my face, I have to hang on for the results.

Painting leaves us with a legacy. Our paintings tell a story that lasts. Long after the paint has dried to my palette and I’ve replaced the thinner I spilt on the carpet (along with the carpet), I will have a beautiful piece of art to share with the world. When I look at a favorite painting of mine from years ago, I don’t remember the difficulty. I get to live with the satisfaction of a job well done. It’s worth it. It’s fun.

What’s your favorite type 2 fun story?

Share your “type 2 fun” with us!

 

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Inspiration Fridays! Are you playing it safe?

Are you playing it safe?

Sometimes life jumps out and grabs you when you least expect it.

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” – Erich Fromm

Just last week I was signing the papers on our new home and getting ready for the big move. Today, I find myself sautéing up fillets of fresh caught tuna in the Dominican Republic. My father’s run into some health problems while on vacation here and needs some help getting home. It’s not what I had planned for the summer, but it’s definitely what’s happening this summer.

We can build our lives around stability and try and play it safe but our life is dealing the cards and the house always has the advantage. Good art knows that. Great art demonstrates it. When I look at a painting that I love, my favorite parts are usually the parts that I don’t quite understand. That’s where the guts are. That’s where the artist got out of their own way in order to let the painting speak for itself.

 

Inspiration Fridays Are you playing it safe? Calolima the Little Creek

Calolima the little creek – Las Terrenas – Dominican Republic

There’s no one specific kind of art that feels predictable, but I can tell when an artist is afraid to risk and refuses to let go. I get it. Life can be unpredictable enough. Still, the letting go is always worth it. It makes room for the unexpected, the brilliant, the magic.

A realistic painting can go well beyond the outlines with such neurotic sensitivity, and depth that we can feel the artists obsession with their craft in every detail. An abstract painting can peel open a part of our psyche. It can address the subconscious that we don’t have words for. In art, any and all of this is possible, but it only works when we are willing to put what we think we know aside, and allow ourselves to be vulnerable. To be alive.

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Inspiration Fridays Are you playing it safe? Calolima the Little Creek Plein Air Painting

And so, I find myself up at 4:30 in the morning pulling my supplies together, jumping on a scooter, and twisting over the hills towards the ocean. The easel’s in place and my paints are laid out for the sunrise and I get to watch as the locals clean the beach and the birds disappear into the morning sky. My painting’s finished and placed in its protective box just before the clouds split open and I’m back in time for breakfast drenched from the ride home. I feel reborn and ready for another uncertain day.

How do you stay creative during the hurricane season of life?

Are you playing it safe?

 

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Inspiration Fridays! Stick with it, it’s worth it.

Stick with it, it’s worth it.

It can be too easy to separate my creativity from my work.

“It may seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first.” – Miyamoto Musashi

There are the things that are fun to do, and then there are the things that I have to do. It’s dangerous thinking really. It relegates my livelihood to the status of a chore. It also makes it more difficult to dig deep when I am focusing on something creative. If the expectation is that creativity isn’t supposed to feel like work, then it’s also natural to assume that our art shouldn’t feel difficult.

Here’s the rub. The richest most rewarding paintings that I have created have come from a lifetime of learning and doing. They are born from struggle and sometimes their creation has felt a lot like work.

 

Pilon's Lunch

Gabriel Mark Lipper – Pilon’s Lunch – oil on panel

Now it’s easy to argue that what we are really looking for when we create is that feeling of “flow”. That flow state that allows us to “just be” and to respond. That flow state is definitely the place from which the best parts of my work emerge. These are the moments of effortlessness, they’re intuitive, and almost magical. But they don’t emerge from nothing. They emerge as the culmination of effort, timing, and trust.

I don’t just close my eyes and arrive at a masterpiece. Some times a painting comes together quickly (and these are often my favorites) but even these paintings don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist because I’ve allowed myself to spend time doing the hard stuff.

My “flow state “ is a lot easier to access than it used to be. Hours spent grinding through mistakes and making new discoveries have paved the way. I’m learning what it is that I love, and what I don’t want to do. I trust the process because I know it will deliver. I know that it’s going to be ugly sometimes. I know that I am going to doubt my ability. I also know that I am going to come out the other side. That is what I’m in love with when I create. I love the reward that I get from the work that I have put in.

What leaves you feeling the most fulfilled?

When you knock it out of the park, is it luck?

Is the process your reward?

 

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