The Reduction Point
Two weeks post procedure, with a large unfinished painting in my living room I’m not allowed to lift. The garden has been teaching me about slowing down and ramblings around why a fallback has to exist before you need it.
Four canvases currently occupy the living room, three of them with the oils nearly dry. One has been harassing me since I got back from Seattle. It’s been over a week since I’ve settled home but I’ve just been side-eyeing it at the easel like an unwelcome guest and it feels like the canvas is eyeing me back. This little standoff is effectively spotlighting my neglect. My excuse is that there are a million other priorities, many of which I'm not cleared for yet.
One of the things I am restricted from physically lifting is this 24”x36” stretched canvas. I tried anyway, and was surprised to discover how aggravatingly heavy some fabric and sticks of wood can feel. Sometimes an inflated sense of my own capabilities can take the wheel, so I admit I don’t always follow the doctor’s orders… But having just gone through an invasive and slightly traumatic procedure… I am in a reluctant surrender to injury.
And now returning from a week in recovery limbo, I have managed to challenge this aching body to a few gentle yoga sessions, some light gardening and an evening ice cream bar to soften the intensity of my impatience. I’m not afraid of slowing down, it’s more so this feeling of being behind on a lot in life right now. It’s like… If I move any slower, I might just calcify.
Outside of healing, there’s plenty of things that need my attention before I get locked into a new creative flowstate anyway. The front yard has become my new happy place since I was given full rein to landscape it last year. And while I really love how much more self-sufficient it’s become, it still needs continuous love and maintenance. The thing about a garden is that so much can change if I look away for a day or even overnight. So when I can’t do a full watering session, a shade cloth or setting up a soaking hose are easy fixes that let me offset the risks of losing the literal fruits of my labor. My rhythm does not accommodate a schedule that has me deep in the garden every day. But if I take a quick walk through, prune a few things, or just take note of what’s going on during my morning ritual, it significantly contributes to my sense of fulfillment - anchoring the things I enjoy with my responsibilities.
I am still determined to finish this painting before the submission deadline in October and I know that I'll get around to this canvas soon enough. In the meantime, I can continue to temper my impatience and balance preliminary sketches for my submission with the garden and other aspects of life that also need to be nurtured.
What really satisfies me is that I can carve time out for my art at all. I think back to a time where I had to remember to eat a meal between five different jobs. While I still have my body in recovery, the home and garden in transition, there’s time enough for a more thoughtful approach to the big ticket items on my list. After all, it’s worth really tracing the direction I want to go, as opposed to freestyling another thought and burning through supplies with this new canvas. For me, it’s less about the wasted material - even though I do try to be conscious about my footprint within my art practice - It’s really more about the time spent fighting to manifest the creative vision. I don’t really enjoy painting over five layers of a thickly coated iterations of a concept on perfectly good canvas. The freehand process feels a lot like trying to recall remnants from a profound dream… But with three times the disappointment and losing my favorite paint colors, the original impulse, and my flow state. Drafting has taught me that the stronger ideas stick and the flat ones dissolve. I don’t bet on influxes of energy to fuel my productivity like I did in my twenties. I plan for month-long staring contests with blank canvases and lulled periods of motivation so that I can sustain the rollout despite my level of “inspiration.” I’m still refining the process but I no longer make it as painful as I used to.
My livelihood rests in the same season as my creative function and I admit, the pressure can make the need for slowing down a lot less sexy. I was told by many self-help gurus that this would be the cost of pursuing my passion, and they’ve coined the cost, “Your Burnout Badge of Honor.” Back when I first heard that I really bought into all the slogans of hustle culture, bleeding for the craft like an eager cult member, and adopted other extreme concepts like rest being for the weak. Very cringe now but back then, of course weakness could not be an option if time was money. And I couldn’t just allow myself to fall behind unless I was ready to starve my ambition. Right?
I’m still very much a DIY/self educator kind of gal who just needs to experience what actually works for me. And from that direct experience over these very educational years, I’ve realized that the price of rest is much more affordable than the strain of enlisting myself into a productivity cult. Even when I’ve dipped into the 9 to 5, there would be seasons where vacations and time off were more than necessary and I would have to grant them to myself. If I’ve learned anything it’s that slowing down doesn’t weaken your capacity, it strengthens the hard work you want to do sufficiently.
I think the real mistake is not having a reduction point to rest on - some definition of your usual work reduced to something you can fall back to when you need to rein it in. Without that fallback you can either keep going at full speed or end up at a full stop.
Full stops for someone like me really don’t work. Running at 100mph with no brakes is a surefire way to get my body to remind me it has boundaries and when I’m not actively honoring those boundaries, my nervous system will force quit for me. And the other tricky thing about having to stop is that more times than not, my momentum will plummet alongside my energy and I’m back to zero, and then I have to spend a week or two climbing out.
It happens often in a busy season, when I feel pretty drained of creative energy to keep my own projects going. But I’m learning to be okay with trading my personal deadlines if it means I’m not cheapening my services. I take a lot of pride in making my clients a priority and tending to them even if my own projects might lag behind a week. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s one that actually feels good to hold. So if I can’t hit my initial goal for next month’s creative launch, I make sure to sketch or journal at least once a day. And the mental framing around this decision allows my time spent doodling to be another form of self-care when I’m wiped after a day of client errands and running 2 workshops on opposite sides of The Bay. Right now I feel calmer with this reduced version of my work; doing one sketch a day, one check-in per client, and one invoice cycle. It might be just 20% of my most productive months but it’s still 20% of movement and not 100% of having to start a new fire.
Sure, it’s been challenging at times but I do love this process of discovering my own seasons and slowly learning to shape them, and name them, and allow myself to surrender to them. There will be times in my life where I’m producing joy and beauty in abundance and there will be times where I’m more reductive and I may need a little joy and beauty re-allocated to me… If modern culture does not allow for me to ebb and flow through these rhythms then I will live in whatever timeline allows for me to function in my own. I believe we all have personal faculty to cultivate rhythms for ourselves whenever we decide its value is worth fostering. I don’t know what the world will look like if we all chose that for ourselves today - could look pretty cool maybe. But what I do know is that by October this canvas will be painted and submitted, and no one looking at the finished product will be able to tell which parts were made in a season when I couldn’t lift it.