Current mood:	relieved
Entry tags:	art, process

Novel-length Art

I woke up this morning working on a painting, with thoughts about color and visual orientation and which references I'd need... a real creative connective web that meant I'd been sleeping on it.

This is in itself not at all unusual.

What was unusual was that this particular painting has been in my head for at least half a year, and I still haven't figured out how I want to approach it. I don't even have a sketch for it, just two or three thumbnails and a lot of notes. But waking up with fragments of more of a plan for it has made me realize: I am using the same process for making this thing as I would for plotting a novel.

I just sank back into the bed and stared at nothing for a while in stupid shock, the kind of 'Doh, this should have been obvious' shock that always feels mildly embarrassing but also a relief.

For years now I've been posting my list of goals for the year, and that list is almost always 'write one novel, 12 short stories and paint 12 paintings.' Which means I've historically treated paintings the same way I have short fiction: as relatively quick to execute, something I could do once a month with time left over.

Sometimes, paintings are that simple. But lately I haven't been going for simple. I'm spending so much time juggling symbolic, thematic, narrative and visual elements that I need to drop it all into my subsconscious just to get something that makes sense back out. And that's really good because it means I'm working on things that are so hard I can't just blow them off.

But just like it takes me 3-12 months to write a novel, it's taking me months to work on any one of these paintings. Which means expecting myself to finish 12, or even six, or even three! of them a year is... um... I'd say "ambitious" but I'm thinking "unrealistic" is probably more accurate.

So I've decided to change my yearly goals. This year, and probably for the next few years, my goals will be:

• Finish one book, where book="writing project that is complete in itself and takes many months to create."
• Publish one book, where book="anything worth selling, whether that's a short story collection, novel, or coffee-table art book."
• Put down bones for book, where book="writing project."
• Finish one painting, where painting="something complicated enough to be a novel in art."
• Put down bones for another two paintings.
• Finish any poetry, short fiction or "short paintings" I feel compelled to do.

The "bones" of two paintings in this case will be a finished composite I can print and go directly to work on. That's a lot of the thought process right there.

A tremendous amount of stress evaporated from me when I finally understood that I'm treating my painting as a novel process, because I'd been ripping my hair out at how slowly I was working and not understanding why. Now, at least, I know.

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