The Grind

aka the slog

So, what I really intended to write about last week was the grind, but sometimes you start writing and your heart says oh no we are talking about this today. Now we are back on track and I have some feelings about this topic too.

Art is not linear. There are some things that tend to happen in a certain order: come up with idea, collect supplies, make art, finish art. But most people don’t see it. They may see some inspo posts on Instagram and a finished piece of work or maybe a time-lapse of some amount of time spent in the studio but you never see all of it. There is this sometimes-vast middle part that most people never see except the artist slogging through it.

That middle part, that’s the slog, the grind. It’s the revisions, it’s the testing colors, or cutting something out 15 times because it isn’t perfect. It’s taking everything off the wall and starting over.

People don’t see that part of the process and I don’t think artists like to talk about it either. I think they assume that if there is some mystery to that part maybe it makes art more elusive or more prestigious. I am going to resoundingly disagree because I think the opposite is true. What if you share that part? Maybe, if your audience sees that middle part where you spend days/hours/weeks working on a piece they would be more interested?

Maybe instead of comments like “my kid could draw that” they say “omg I saw how much time Mindy spent cutting that one piece and no one else could do that!”

Aside from sharing the slog, I also think that some people don’t actually like it. They find it daunting and overwhelming because things aren’t linear in art. I, on the other hand, embrace it. It is the good stuff. The repetition, the choices, the construction, the looking again and again, that part makes you who you are as an artist. That is where you develop your voice as an artist.

Every time you cut a piece of fabric or make a paint stroke, you build muscle memory and you develop your eye. I have now made five pieces in my Fluid Dynamics series and it mostly centers around one simple figure. That figure has very precise curves to it and when I enlarge or shrink it, I make sure that those precise curves are retained. They are so important to how that piece is drawn that if they are slightly off, it doesn’t work. Have a look below at it.

If you look carefully, you can see that the curve on the long sides is not perfectly mirrored. They don’t exactly follow each other. And the wider end is slightly curved. Those parts must be retained for it to be the same figure.

I have spent hundreds of hours cutting out and sewing this figure. I’ve stretched it so it’s super long and skinny, made it squatty, made it wider, made it tiny; but every time it retains the key elements that make it unique. That make it mine.

This part is so important to lean in to. Embrace the slog! Use it to make work that is uniquely yours. Develop your skills and put in the hours so when someone walks by your work, they KNOW it was made by you.