I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
I started a new painting this week, and it’s been through multiple iterations.
I liked the first one. I didn’t like the second one. I liked the third one, sort of. Then I covered it all over and started again.
Producing a painting that I really like, that I think is worthy of calling “done,” takes so much out of me. It doesn’t just require a lot of work, it also requires sketching (when I’m doing something with representational elements) and thinking and angsting.
Painting is just damn hard. I get an idea in my mind of what subject to paint, what color palette to use, and a general idea of the composition. But as I go, a painting will develop in its own direction. I have to make decisions as I go. And it’s really, really hard to do that, even though I say that I paint “intuitively.” Much of actually creating (what I think is) a good painting requires experimentation and evaluation and thinking what to do next.
It reminds me a little of the quote sometimes attributed to Ernest Hemingway, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”1 That’s of course referencing how with writing, you are pouring out your life force onto the page. But there’s something like that in painting too.
In The defense against slop and brainrot, Paul Jun writes about how friction builds strength:
The more the world automates, the more value accrues to people who continue to condition their fundamental capabilities. It’s like watching a gym empty out because everyone discovered protein powder—meanwhile, the few who keep showing up, deadlifting and squatting, get exponentially stronger.
AI gives us away to avoid all those deadlifts:
Our brains are designed to prefer shortcuts, and AI has become the ultimate shortcut dealer. GPT drafts emails while you sip coffee. Midjourney generates logos in thirty seconds. TikTok explains Stoicism in eleven slides of pastel text. The temptation is obvious: outsource the friction, save time.
You need friction to get good at your craft, whether it’s writing or painting or something else.
Writing blog posts here serves as my daily writing workout. I don’t labor too hard over any one piece. I almost never use AI to help me, unless I want a quick summary paragraph for something I already know about. If there’s something it suggests to me that I’m unfamiliar with, I go look up and review source material so I can be sure I’m not sharing some hallucination.
Jun writes, “if you can think well, AI becomes a multiplier. If you can’t, AI just amplifies your mistakes.” That seems about right.
Maybe I need to add targeted painting practice and skill development into my schedule, so I can improve without doing it in the context of a painting I’m trying to produce. Maybe I’ll start doing weekly “studies,” copying paintings of famous people, or doing tutorials, especially those that show how to paint representationally (an ever more important component of my work).
I attended an art workshop last weekend on Getting Organized and Exhibiting sponsored by WCACO last weekend. One thing the workshop leader said stuck with me, “You need to keep developing your skills.” She had been working as an artist for ten years. Somehow I thought I would arrive at a level of competence and I wouldn’t need to keep working on improving. In retrospect that seems kind of silly.
I could aim at doing deliberate practice, the concept of which was developed by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues in the 1990s:
Deliberate practice means practicing with a clear awareness of the specific components of a skill we’re aiming to improve and exactly how to improve them. Unlike regular practice, in which we work on a skill by repeating it again and again until it becomes almost mindless, deliberate practice is a laser-focused activity. It requires us to pay unwavering attention to what we’re doing at any given moment and whether it’s an improvement or not.
Deliberate practice includes the following elements:
- Setting specific goals around what skill gap you’re working on
- Bringing full concentration to your practice
- Getting immediate feedback from a coach, teacher, or self-monitoring system
- Working at the edge of your current comfort zone
- Repeating with refinement, gradually internalizing improvements
- Doing all this effortfully. Deliberate practice doesn’t put you into flow or give you immediate enjoyment.
Wow, that doesn’t sound all that pleasant! Nevertheless, I can imagine it could revolutionize my ability to create good, even great, art if I did it regularly.
Deliberate practice is a way of introducing a whole lot of friction into your skill development, I guess.
- Apparently it was actually Red Smith, a sportswriter, who said this in an interview in 1949 when asked if writing came easily to him. ↩︎