Something is Better
It was actually A. (my closest confidant, my dearest friend) who first defined the word prolific for me. Because I had always heard it in context with The Greats—meaning the Monets, Picassos, and Michelangelos of this, our terrestrial plane—I had assumed the word implied a high degree of success. It does not. To be prolific is simply to produce a lot of something. It doesn’t mean that you are popular or important or even very good. It just means that whatever you create, you create a lot of it (which in all fairness is a success of its own).
As someone who cares a whole lot about creating and has, rather unfortunately, wrapped up a lot of my identity in lofty and ill-defined ideas of being an artist or a writer or some other bonafide Creative Person, I find myself avoiding writing/drawing/painting/creating more often than I’d like to admit.
It seems to be a shared struggle among creative types: while we’d like to be doing the thing we like doing, we spend a fair amount of valuable time not doing that thing and then feeling guilty about it. Why? Lots of reasons. For me, I have a problem with making things too precious. Either I feel like I’ve spent too much on supplies and want to save them for a really good piece, like the piece, my magnum opus (the thing which I ironically shall never achieve unless I allow myself to use the good supplies on bad art first) or I begin a project with the intention of making it that great thing, my Great American Novel, my Pulitzer Prize winner, and the very stupid but real pressure I’ve put on myself builds until, at the first sign of trouble or boredom, I abandon the project in its infancy.
In turn, for all the time I do spend creating I am left not with a portfolio but a graveyard of unfinished projects.
But here’s the thing: I would so much rather have an abundance of less-than-excellent finished pieces (with any luck, some successes coincidentally among them) than a closed fist of promising beginnings. Because it is better to make something than nothing at all.
And so I’ve started creating more, and more often, with the goal of proliferation in mind. And I’ve found that the more I create, the more I feel like creating. And the more I create, the more creative ideas I have. And the better the quality of those ideas. And the better the end results.
A Woman is a Green Bean
So here’s a simple watercolor portrait very loosely inspired by a pose the late, great Anna Karina takes in the movie Une femme est une femme (which, by the way, I would highly recommend if not for its story and delightful characters then for Karina’s exceptional wardrobe). In the later stages, I left the paints thick and a little sticky so as to have a more gouache-y effect.
A. rightfully, lovingly teased me a little over the coffee rings in the lower right corner. A contrived carelessness I plead guilty too. Oh, to be a genuinely gorgeous mess in the studio: a real artist with paint in their hair and an ashtray of cigarette butts who sets their mug on the unprotected edge of the canvas. Still, it balances the piece. And I love the look of coffee rings.