One Week 100 People is an art challenge where, over the span of a 5 day work week (or 7 as a normal week), sketchers draw 100 people – roughly 20 per day. I first learned about this challenge from a local sketcher friend, please have a look at his work and blog! 🙂 I …
One of the funny tricks my mind plays is confusing thinking through doing something versus actually doing it. Well, I swore I posted all my urban sketches and en plein air paintings, but I guess I didn’t!
Lets start with a few from October, 2017. Around that time of year, I went to visit some family and Nova Scotia and took my painting supplies with me. I’ll likely do this from now on, since visiting Nova Scotia and not painting might as well be a crime…what a beautiful piece of Canada.
9″x12″. Watercolor on 140lbs watercolor rag paper. The ragged coastlines of Nova Scotia, featuring a prominent rock painted entirely on-location. The painting aims to be accurate while being loose and gestural. En plein air painting. ~2017
This is one of my favourite spots to revisit every year, and so I will leave it vague as to where it is. Only locals really know how to get there, and I think it should stay that way instead of being trampled by selfie-taking tourists. Not that there isn’t an abundance of landscape at any stop in the road, should you choose to paint yourself. Just this place in particular…is special. This painting was completed entirely on location in about 2-3 hours.
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When I started streaming, it was an experiment to see if anyone at all would show up. Just even 1 person I don’t already know as a friend, or family, or someone else. I didn’t expect anything from it. Everyone’s asking me how I can tolerate having a camera pointed in my face when I can barely tolerate giving a presentation to a room of 3? Good question, because the truth is: I don’t know. I’m not psychologist and I can’t explain it, however I talked to some other streamers about it and we concluded it’s basically an introvert party where we get to control exactly how much socializing we get and with who. Anyone can leave at any time. If I don’t like someone and they’re being awful, I just ban them. No one has to make awkward eye contact. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. But I think there’s something more to it than that, because the other day I volunteered myself to go on a talk show I found filming downtown and asked questions on camera, which would otherwise have made me run and hide had streaming not been there to condition my shyness away.
It’s really helping with having an art-producing schedule; I can’t just keep putting off making art for some other seemingly important thing because I promised my viewers I’d be there so&so many times a week. It really makes me realize how much I do put off making art, when I always thought I didn’t. The span of time between two intervals when I create is a lot longer without a schedule to keep me in check. Generally, I’m not good at perceiving time… a month can go by and I won’t notice, or a day goes by and feels like it’s been weeks. So, I’m not really surprised. It’s not that I consciously procrastinate, it’s that I don’t notice how much stands in the way. My streaming computer broke for about 2 weeks and I felt pretty unhappy I couldn’t paint, and in that time span I realized that is usually how infrequently I painted. Yeah, that’s pretty bad. If I want to work on my style and have a new body of work that stands out, that can’t be happening.
So here are a few pieces I’ve completed since I started streaming! If you don’t count me goofing around with experiments, then I think I started in November of last year. As I’m selecting these, I’m realizing I made more than I thought. Some of these I already posted about, so I will talk about the ones I haven’t. All but 2 of these are in my art store as prints. If you’d think you’d like to watch one day, you can go here.
Working through crippling social anxiety is one of my on-going New Year’s Resolutions and definitely a huge road block from friendship, live streaming, and presentations. It’s fairly common artists and introverts struggle with overcoming social anxiety. I can safely say it’s been a work in progress for a decade, and every year I look back and I’m surprised with myself.
My social anxiety used to be such a force to reckon with I would sit at home with an empty fridge to avoid making eye contact with a cashier (this is ages ago, when I was single and no one else could go fill the fridge for me). I pitched a film script to a jury in my second year of university, and that put me so far over the edge — I blacked out in the bathroom. Like a lot of anxious people, I’ve also drank myself to oblivion at every social event and greatly embarrassed myself in the process while attempting to find comfort…it’s very common and bad advice to drink to “take the edge off” a social situation. For me, it rarely helps, if not makes things worse. Any good therapist will try coach you away from relying on a drug response to cope with situations, especially if it’s away from alcoholism.
I guess I’ve been wanting to write something on this for a long time, but I never felt like I was quite there. It’s been a decade and I feel I’ve read “all that’s out there” for social anxiety advice. I’ve gone from having anxiety attacks everyday to being very calm, and I’m starting to notice a marked difference between myself and other people with anxiety. Some people even mistake me for being outgoing!
A comic strip drawn for a project, SFX Comic, which used sound effects as inspiration for plot direction in each strip. This one transitions between the sounds “smek” and a fart. Ink and marker on bristol. ~2014
After 10 years of social anxiety, what have I observed?
I think social anxiety is a symptom of a low self-esteem + a higher-than-normal fear of rejection and failure + being an asshole to yourself. Yes, you are an asshole to yourself.
Think of an average person in high school breaking through that initial awkwardness of having feelings for people, coming out about those feelings, ultimately getting a Yes or No response, or being ridiculed for their actions. Eventually by repeating that experience enough, the average person builds up a tougher skin, learns how to gracefully ask someone out, and things turn out okay. They make friends, have relationships, they get along with people at work.
For people with social anxiety, it’s like that experience x1000 applied to every single social interaction in their life, with the added wall of paralysis on many occasions. It turns paying for groceries into a confrontational, emotionally intense, and very uncomfortable experience. But why does it matter if a cashier thinks you’re awkward? Are they even paying that much attention, or are they zoned out, don’t care because you’re not the first person to mess up saying “Good morning” or to drop your credit card in the universe?
Here is another handful of paintings from this summer and fall. Unlike the images in the last post, a significant portion of these images were finished based on a photograph later. I don’t usually do this with paintings I start on location, maybe add a few missing details here and there from a photo, however …
There’s a pile of artwork I finished scanning, archiving, packaging for storage, from this past warm weather season. Since I have my sketching bag prepared at all times now, I throw it on an go. I draw and paint, and then the artwork gets thrown into a pile in my studio to be dealt with …
Here is a painting I finished in the spring that I had to hold off posting because I had entered it in a contest. The downside of this is that I forget many of my original thoughts on this painting, as I went travelling afterwards. Sometimes artists lose sight of the potential other reasons their …
I’m excited to say I am working on two new oil paintings. It’s been… about 6 whole years since I’ve done a large-scale oil painting. It’s because we have our new studio space in our apartment, which is better equip for ventilating the fumes, the scale, and capturing splatter. I don’t have any pictures of …
