(no more time tracking)
When I woke this morning, something told me to take Robert Genn's book, The Painter's Keys, with me to the studio. (The link is to reviews at Amazon.com, but to order the book you'll need to find it elsewhere, perhaps via www.bookfinder.com.) I think this waking idea was sparked by reading in Robert Genn's recent letter to artists, about a woman who read The Painter's Keys, quit her day job to paint full time, and has been a successful painter ever since. I thought, "sounds good to me!"
My intuition was right. I had kind of dragged myself to the studio, the way I've been dragging myself there every morning this week - tired and without much enthusiasm. Reading parts of The Painter's Keys restored my zest for artmaking. I'm hereby liberating myself from the timer as well as from the clock. Robert Genn mentions that he's experimented with lots of ways to facilitating his work - deadlines, time tracking, etc. - and nothing works for him as well as asking what will bring him the most joy to do next, and doing it. He calls it "the joy method." I may not have his exact phrasing, but that's the main idea.
So that's what I'm going to do - go for joy.
Back in 1992, I renamed my blacksmithing business and actual studio building, Ecstasy Forge. I took this pretty far. For example, in my accounting software, Quicken Home & Business, I categorized my expenses using only two categories: ecstasy, and not. It still makes me smile to remember this. Of course, this didn't work for tax returns, so I had to take another look at the figures once a year. But for 363 days of the year, all I needed to ask was "did this expense bring me ecstasy? Or something less?"
Later I realized that ecstasyforge.com was going to bring problems as a website address. When I named my studio, I didn't know there was a drug called ecstasy. And of course the internet is full of porn sites advertising ecstasy. So I renamed my business a more prosaic "Morgan Sculpture" and will probably end up just with Catherine Jo Morgan, LLC. Ecstasy Forge was a great thing, though. Maybe I'll even get wild again and go back to it, at least as a name for my studio building. And I could still look at my expenses in those two categories, by using the "class" feature in Quicken. I bet if I do, I'll find out that about 20% of my expenses bring me ecstasy - maybe even less. (But probably about 80% of the money I spend on art supplies brings me ecstasy - or would if I'd let myself go for joy.)
So no more time tracking - except perhaps an occasional question: "what could I do now, that would bring me joy?"
Isn't this remarkably similar to the question that's been working for me, "what thought could I think now, that would make me happy?"
I will confess that I first came across a copy of The Painter's Keys in a bookstore several years ago. I opened it to a page on which Robert Genn said that if he goes to the studio and finds that he doesn't really want to work that day, he doesn't. He flies a kite, or does something else he really wants to do. I was so offended by this that I put the book back on the shelf. I was convinced that this man would lead me terribly astray. Ha! Pretty funny. Thanks, Robert.
1:47:04 PM 
|
|
