My baby is teething. As I write this, last night I put my baby to sleep at 8:30. I glued paper cats together for about 30 minutes. He woke up at 9. I fed him and rocked him a bit. I glued more bookmarks and primed a canvas. He woke up at 10. I rocked him. This time I crawled into bed, hoping for the best. He woke up at 11 and 12. He slept until 2 after that and until 4. I know that a 2 hour block is happening if I have a dream.
Time as a parent for me is certainly different than time as a non parent. To make the art I want to make and to work on the projects that matter to me, time is now like a high-intensity workout. It’s not like a 10 mile run at any speed, stopping to snap photos of flowers and trees - it’s a 10 mile tempo run that MUST be finished in a certain time.
I have a very loose schedule with my baby. I don’t envy people who have each hour of their day planned out on a calendar, and I’ve never been this way with any part of my life. I find that for me, just because I have timeblocks labeled, does not mean that I control my time, or that I use my time in the best way. In fact, the less labeling, the less expectation, the better I seem to do. When I’ve traveled, I have no itineraries other than getting to the airport at the right time. Given this, if I had a schedule like “My baby eats at 9:30, 12:30, and 5:30” I think I would go insane or feel disappointed, because the schedule would be broken every single day. The one thing I keep to is bedtime for him each day at about 8 pm.
I also don’t have any hard rule like “I must work on my art 1 hour a day.” I don’t track this at all, but possibly this is because I’ve already put in so much time for art that I’m in a maintaining mode at this point. If I was trying to learn or do something totally new, I would try for 1 hour a day.
I took the Clifton Strengths assessment a few years ago and scored into the Maximizer trait. I never felt like a test classified me so well, even when I found out I was a Libra Rising ;). Being a Maxmizer means making the most of any situation, bringing the best out of other people, and creating value from almost nothing. Maybe a lot of people from small towns end up with this kind of trait, because it takes creativity and utility to survive a place where there’s not many people. Something I thought was relevant was I had Connectedness as my top Clifton trait, so, no matter what I do, I make the most of it, and in everything, there’s a purpose for me. Everything and everyone matters to me deeply, it might be a bit weird to others though because I simply don’t need it to be in a schedule.
Overall I think that motherhood has been wildly good for my art and my particular situation. The little time I do have is more high-impact. I seem to get more done in shorter amounts of time, because short amounts of time are all that I have.
Both right now and before motherhood, I tend to work in 1-2 week sprint-like efforts, a behavior which is fairly easy to witness on my Instagram. I’ll work on a series or style, crank out several paintings or drawings, and then change to a new series relatively quickly. It’s a fun way to keep things new with my art practice. Last month I made 12 mine paintings on glass. The week before the mines, I worked on four oil paintings of nudes. The two weeks before that, I almost didn’t remember what I was doing, but now I remember it was abstract mountain paintings on plexiglass.
I didn’t know about this sprinting pattern at all before observing myself more closely. Now that I’ve observed it, I don’t plan on either fighting it or leaning into it, I’ll just sort of let it be. I will continue to be in the moment of art.
I made the art below while being a mom of a not-yet-1 year old
These are just a few pieces, I made so many more that I have trouble counting and I keep track of everything I do in my monthly Sketchbook Confessional blogs.
What I’m most excited about is I haven’t really flagged on skill. I had a weird couple moments while pregnant where I thought I would lose some of my drawing ability if I didn’t use it. It turns out everything is ok. I think I haven’t lost any skills because I have a drive to retain them.
Something I’ve enjoyed doing with my baby now that he can sit up is I take him to restaurants where I make a drawing of a photo I took in my Traveler’s Notebook.
He really enjoys looking at all the different people at each restuarant or coffeeshop. When I thought about this, I realized I never was around so many people growing up in Leadville in the 90s. It was simply a smaller place, so if we ever went out to eat as a family, the most packed anywhere would be was with five other families. So, I think it’s good for my baby to get used to seeing lots of people, and people of different ages and cultures.
For these drawings I use a Sharpie of only one color for each piece. It’s fun to work with limits like this. Not only is the color limited, but the size of the pen is limited too, so this keeps my traditional art skills, (I must avoid saying sharp), well-tuned.
Interspersed with my time spent on art itself are art-related support tasks like writing on this website, cleaning and organizing my studio, checking out local art shows or galleries, running, talking to other artists, and shopping for new art supplies.
About a year ago I had the luck of reading the book “The Obstacle is the Way” by Ryan Holliday. I tend to like all of his books that I read, I have read I think about five of them but nowhere near all of his books. I even read Trust Me I’m Lying a long time ago. I think that, in the purest form of the phrase, The Obstacle is the Way with my baby, except I wouldn’t go so far as to opaquely call him an obstacle, he’s certainly a challenging kind of entity. I run with him in the stroller instead of running alone. Pushing 25 pounds plus whatever the stroller weighs up a hill is no easy task. After doing this, I am so strong its a little dumb, it’s a little surprising.
Endurance is a good word for parenting, isn’t it? I am able to endure so much sleep deprivation and lifting of my baby that it’s a bit suprising. Maybe it surprises a lot of parents.
The rocking of my baby that I described in the first paragraph of this blog has completely stopped, he’s fully sleep-trained now and he falls asleep on his own within a few minutes. It took me several weeks to make entries into this blog, sentence by sentence, moment by free moment, where I wasn’t committed to doing other stuff like painting, baby care, running, slacking, tweeting, whatever blue-sky posting is. I feel like I do dishes and laundry 4000 times a day. In the scraps in between, I get art and writing done. With my sleep-trained baby, I do miss the rocking a bit, but not the sleep deprivation. As much as my baby needs me, he now needs me a bit less. It’s a funny feeling. Whenever someone steps in and watches after him for a few hours, I almost don’t know what to do with myself. I guess that I, too, am now trained in a way.
As some might know who are reading this blog, I’ve kept a Hobonichi Techo planner for about 4 years. On June 10th in the 2023 planner, this quote by Shigesato Itoi appears:
It’s hard for me to really say how much I needed this quote as a new mom. As a painter, I deeply realize there are few things in life that have rewarded me more completely than deep uninterrupted work. My mind privileges deeper work as better, but I find what I am doing now is just as good as hours of non-interruption. Maybe it’s even better. Perhaps what is most true is that the deep work of my past is still there, and this is what allows me to complete paintings in short bursts of free time. I’m operating on a foundation that won’t move or change, no matter how much the future changes. Now I am off to do some dishes.