"Practice," my dad told me (I was about six years old at the time) "means doing something over and over again until you get it right."
He wasn't exactly wrong to word it that way. He said it as simply as possible for my young brain to grasp it easily. But practice is so much more than that, and it's taken me this long to understand that.
Practice is much more than doing something over and over again. You can practice doing cartwheels, but until you put real, concerted effort into pointing your toes, lifting your legs high, and coordinating speed with balance, you're going to make the same half-assed, legs only halfway up tumbling
attempts that I did throughout my tenth year, until I finally gave up on gymnastics altogether. (Well, it was that feeling of making no real progress mixed with my mother's refusal to pay another dime for something she deemed 'too expensive', but that's a blog post for another day).
If you practice drawing the same thing, writing the same thing, without paying attention to lines and how shading should look or your spelling or grammar or avoiding the passive voice, you're not going to grow in your craft. You're simply going to improve upon whatever mistakes you are making, or to quote a friend of mine, "Perfect your stick figures."
It took me a long time to realize all of this. My dad meant well, but he hadn't accounted for how words our parents tell us and that we in turn tell our kids impact how they think and how they relate to the world.
As regards my art, I dreaded the word. I wanted to be where I wanted to be--right now!--with none of that boring 'draw the same shapes' and 'shade the same shading' over and over 'until I got it right'. The word 'practice' took all the fun and joy out of it. It made me focus on my mistakes and see art as "Well, I just have to keep slogging through the 'Oh my god, I suck at this' stage until one day, magically, I was suddenly 'good', and then, only then, could I enjoy what I was doing.
It doesn't work that way.
If you look at honing your skills and perfecting your work as 'slogging', and don't enjoy the process and its results for what they are, you're going to be where I was until I decided to stop being there: slogging along, getting impatient, and quitting, over and over. If I'd have keep drawing the way I'd been a year ago, I would have vastly improved right now. Instead, I let myself get overwhelmed by 'practice', saw no progress, and my depression and wrongheadedness got the best of me. Again.
One of my favorite artists--who is also a fellow 'spudess', or Devo fan--told me she got to where she was by hard work and practice. I at the time stubbornly insisted to myself that it couldn't just be that--she obviously had tons of talent which made it loads easier, talent that I didn't have. Recently, I asked her about her feelings on the word 'practice', and this is what she had to say:
"My answer would be that depending on what the particular skill involved is, sometimes 'practicing' isn't really what one needs.
One just needs to keep doing what they enjoy doing ( say for example, drawing or playing music ) and that will in itself be your 'practice'.
Letting your skill develop over time naturally is what is really needed, not a 'forced' regiment or process.All too often that drains the enjoyment out of what you are doing.
Let it flow naturally through you and out into the physical world.
Don't stop, and don't let others opinions discourage you.
Keep going and know that anything is possible." --JW
Detail of her drawing of Devo she posted recently on Facebook. this is Alan Myers, aka the Human Metronome. Pretty sure he didn't get hung up on what practice means, either. And he was AWESOME.
Over and over, I let myself talk me out of something I wanted.
There's reasons for that--some of you will call it excuses, and I am okay with that; healing is a process, not a 'Gee, that happened so long ago, I'll will it away, poof! it's gone!" like some wish it could be--and I'll be getting to those as this blog moves forward.
Ask yourself this week: What are three things that I constantly talk myself out of doing?
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