Keeping the balance
Artwork by M. Manolache
Whenever I dedicate time to art, it seems to me that life is more colourful. Also whenever I spend too much time doing it, things start to lose colour. I thought that one day when I have all the time in the world I may do more creative work. But that time never comes.
So the days went forwards, time didn’t stop, nor did it go backwards and life only became busier and there was no more room for creative work. I thought that only if I had a lot of time, I could be more creative. But then I also saw that whenever I spent a lot of time being creative I felt exhausted. I had this idea that only large scale, time-consuming project is a real project.
It was when I wanted to spend less time drawing that I started drawing again. Smaller scales, less time and more sketches, not something “final”. Dedicating all the time to art was something I thought of as ideal. But that ideal was something that could never be real in my case and many other cases. This seemed to be a tragedy. Or was it? I found that personally, I take more joy in chunk size drawings. It was my way of “eating the elephant one spoon at a time”. It seems that maybe a busy schedule was ought to teach me was that I do need balance in everything.
When you’re passionate about art, you may think that there is never enough time for what you would like to do. But then, if you do engage a lot with your craft, you may find out you hit spot when you feel like you are depleted.
Or if you look too much at your work, you start going in a never-ending loop of judging it.
Being engaged with other activities, more than being engaged with drawing helped me keep a distance, and helped me feel more inspired or motivated when coming back to a blank piece of paper. Drawing on small scale, using simple materials could be a way to reboot the creative process. Or at least this was the case for me.
Artwork: “Commuter Portraits”
Wow, you are just wonderful!