Shaking It Up

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Canyon Sunrise Watercolor on Yupo

There is comfort in mastering an artistic medium—often taking years, maybe even decades, to become fluent enough with our materials and tools so that we can express ourselves with confidence and fluidity. We come to see them as old reliable friends whom we can trust with our tenderest creative notions. However, after some time carrying on successfully in this mode, we can actually become too comfortable and slip dangerously close to repeating, in variations perhaps, what we know how to do best. This is considered a desirable achievement in almost any other profession, but not art.

Whenever we sense that we are doing a bit of sleepwalking through our work, we try to shake it up somehow. There are many different strategies for this. It can be useful and fun to try to work in an unfamiliar medium or perhaps on a new kind of surface. Trying something new changes the way we have to respond to the materials and in so doing, …