What I learnt from my year of painting

At the start of 2015 I bought a Moleskine diary with the intention of completing a piece of artwork everyday for all 365 days of the year. I've recently completed the diary, a couple of days after the end of 2015.

It's a complete joy and sense of accomplishment to complete a task for the whole year. It wasn't perfect, but I let that go. To do otherwise was to risk stopping and getting stuck halfway through the year or when I got busy or distracted by all the other things which come up as a mama to two toddlers.

I chose a diary as I wanted the accountability of being able to see where I was in the process, of whether I was on track or not. It gave me grace to be able to come back when I got behind, when the boys were poorly or if we were away from home and I didn't have time to complete. I let go of being on track all the time. Mainly I let go of that when my daily art pieces became fuller, and took me more time to complete. Sometimes I'd come back to them through the day, letting the paint dry on a letter and coming back to add more later. Small slots of time, available in the there and then, in the way that often bigger slots of time don't open up.

The diary format itself was both a help and a hindrance. It helped me keep on track and it helped me to go back when I was behind, I knew exactly what needed completing. It was all in one place. The downside was I could only find a lined notebook, when really I wanted the blank space. By the end of the year it was getting very hard to fill in pages as they wanted to collect together, especially when working on left hand pages. This was helped with a giant elastic band. 

The paper itself was...ok. As I used different media, watercolour, acrylics, and some collage, some of the pages worked better than others. Some of the collage  stuck together. Some of the paint eeked through onto different pages, as it did when I tried mark making. I integrated these where I could into the next painting, and the one after that if it was necessary. 

Part of the way through the year I started painting mandala which helped give me a focus point instead of staring at the blank page. It helped me with a structure for the time I had to give. I enjoyed seeing the different emblems and motifs I could use and how each was different, some loose and fluid, some planned and more detailed. 

It was all a learning. It feels like a gift to myself to have a record of a year of work, and someone described it as like a patchwork of the year. I'm already thinking about what I will see at the end of 2016. It won't be completely like this. I liked a piece a day but I did have to prioritise that and that meant saying good bye to other ways of working and other projects. So far I'm sat with what I want that to look like as I look back and review 2017. 

May your year be full of joy and creativity.