Via the Instagram feed of University of Alabama at Birmingham Professor Doug Baulos, comes a list of 10 excellent commandments that can certainly be applied to effective art studio/classroom practice.
Eugene Delacroix said, "Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life."
“The 10,000-Hour Rule"
Author Malcolm Gladwell suggests that the key to mastery and success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.
Mr. Miyagi said "Wax on. Wax off."
Nineteenth century novelist Anthony Trollope wrote that, “A small daily task,
if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
Artist Chuck Close
famously says,
“The
advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to
me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs;
the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the
clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you
are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out
of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you.
If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can
sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to
work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you
and something else that you reject will push you in another direction.
Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel
like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I
find that's almost never the case.”
The Artist Habits of Mind grew out of research done by Project Zero, a group at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education.
Aristotle said, "We are what we
repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
Quit the pretense. Engage and persist. Make good habits. Stay Goaled.
Do the work and learn to love it.
Make Great Art!
