Solution to Habituation: Multitasking
Today was a good day for art.
Today, I spent 1.5 hours painting Wonder Woman's ballerina dress. 2 hours inking Thor Ballerina. I posted an Instragram shot, and I am now blogging. Simultaneously, I have been listening to @LavenderTowne youtube channel on everything "artist" related. So lots of art things going on. However, I could only do this as work was a bit slow today, I work-from-home, and for whatever reason the house/baby chores were a minimal (I still installed an Ikea blackout curtain in the nursery). Anyway, this is not a journal log, so back to the topic of discussing multitasking.
As part of my daily affirmation, I tell myself "I am a professional artist. I will become a professional artist." Yet, this sentence scares me. The reason it scares me is that everyone says that being a professional artist and earning your living through your own personal art is to make your 9-5 job ... art. Presumably all blossoming artists think to themselves, "Hell yeah! Screw this corporate/marketing/consulting/graphic design office bs. Sign me up." But I find that I can only do art in short 1-2 hour bursts. The amount of energy and creativity required to do art is extreme; even if it's just sketching. Therefore, I cannot begin to imagine doing art for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 52 weeks a year (there are no vacations for artists)? I do think to myself that it could be fun, but I wonder if burnout and disinterest will arise. Yet today, I think I found a possible solution.
First, I think that the issue faced with an 8 hour art day is habituation. This is not to say that we cannot as artists develop "flow" and become totally immersed with a piece and do it for a multitude of hours. But I think that after working on a piece for a while you will habituate to it and it becomes monotonous. It's not as exciting and novel as when you first sat down during the day. It begins to feel like work... hard, tiring, exhausting ... work. The difficulty is that when art becomes work with a mentality of "I must just power through" then we are just replacing one misery of our corporate jobs with another. Now a bad day as a professional artist is still probably a pretty good day compared to the office. Nevertheless, we want our transition to being an artist to be a sustained joy.
Therefore, one of my solutions to maintaining that joy appears to be multitasking. In art multi-tasking is the ability to do multiple things simultaneously and shift gears easily. By simultaneous, the idea is not to be painting with the right hand and sketching with the left, but it is to constantly do different things in a concurrent fashion to keep your mind fresh. In other words, be working on 2-3 different pieces, take a break to instagram/blog/update website, spend some time researching others or reading about art, etc. and then cycle back to one of the pieces and continue the circle this will keep you busy. Mind you, when you actually make it big (selling artwork consistently), then you will add things like shipping, attending artshows, and so forth to your daily/weekly routine. Then of course if you become so famous then you'll just hire and manage a team to do that.
I do think the crux of multi-tasking though is not how many different activities there are only because that can actually turn into distractions. Instead, the crux of multitasking is the number of pieces you are working on. I think anywhere from 3-5 is the perfect number. Right now, I am just focusing on 3 pieces . First is the Wonder Woman Ballerina, second is the Thor Ballerina, and last is the Memento Mori Magneto oil painting. It's kind of fun as they all progress through the stages and I'm starting to feel like a factory that is starting to operate efficiently.