Only do what is easy and fun.

A gradient with a silhouette: time-tested easy formula

“Only do what is easy and fun.”

I don’t remember where I got this motto; somebody said it in a forum or something, and it really resonated with me. I’ve taken it and run with it as my art mantra.

I love it because it is counterintuitive to everything I was taught in my Puritan-work-ethic, perfectionism-driven formal education, where the mottos were more like: hard work pays off; nothing that is worthwhile comes easy; success is 99% perspiration; strive for continuous improvement; always do your best; the worst thing you can be is lazy; push yourself; no pain, no gain. I was taught that the ideal is to be working at 100%+ capacity at all times, that feeling exhausted and dulled down is the sign that you are doing the right thing, and rewards of any kind should only come after you’ve truly earned them, which as the bar is always being raised, turns out to be never. I was taught that every minute of the day should be spent striving toward long-term goals, including hobbies, which are not to be enjoyed, but are rather the means to the end of improving your character (e.g. becoming “well-rounded”), gaining access to elite institutions (e.g. getting into college), building toward a great masterpiece (as determined by elite institutions), and/or becoming monetizable.

It is easy to fall into this mindset with art.

Against work ethic

Signs and symptoms of a Puritan work ethic in art:

Prioritizing outcome (how the finished piece looks) over experience (how you felt making it)
Seeking external validation (someone else to tell you it’s good)
Poring over advice from “the masters”, taking their word as gospel
Fixating on mistakes; overworking pieces to fix errors, or repeatedly attempting the same piece over and over
Ranking every artist you see as “better than me” or “worse than me” and feeling jealous of those whom you consider “better”
Downplaying your strengths, defining yourself by your weaknesses
Avoiding using good supplies or taking on difficult projects because you wouldn’t be able to do them justice
Always feeling as though you “should” really be doing whatever exercise or lesson you find most difficult, boring, and hateful
Feeling bad means it’s working!

The truth is that art is not an area where increased effort neatly yields objectively better results. Most areas are not like that, but art even more so because it is subjective and it is not actually possible to rank all art as “good” or “bad.” Art that requires a high degree of skill and effort can make you feel something; so can art that’s done quickly and seemingly effortlessly by a person who knows what they are doing; so can art that is inexpertly done by a novice.

Which is not to say that there’s no way to “get better” at art; of course you can gain skill and experience, resulting in muscle memory, understanding of materials, discovery of techniques, and so on which increase the chances that you’ll know how to approach a piece, understand how to evoke the types of feelings you want to, and be able to execute on your vision. But these are all things that can and should be fun. They are part of the journey. It’s not like you do this once, get through the hard part, and then it’s smooth sailing and you can crank out masterpieces. The journey is all there is.

Applying perfectionism to art is a good way to ruin the experience of making art for yourself, and a bad way to get better at the kind of art you want to do. An overactive work ethic even makes it harder for you to even know what kind of art you want to do, since it naturally leads you to aggrandize whatever is hardest for you personally.

There is another way

There is a synergistic virtuous cycle that can work in art if you lean into it:

Like stuff
Immerse yourself in stuff you like
Play around and see what’s fun to do
Keep doing that

I’ve been doing art in one form or another for much of my life. When I look at what has succeeded – what I love about my art – I see things that I love to do for their own sake. The things I do well are things I love: to work quickly; work with color; paint directly; closely observe skies and clouds and stars and birds. I don’t sit down and practice boring gradient exercises over and over. But I do paint a lot of gradients because I love painting skies and those are a lot of gradients. I don’t sit down and memorize pigment codes or properties. I just know them because I love to think about paint.

Of course there are skills I’m not good at. I don’t know shit about perspective. It looks boring to me so I haven’t tried to work on it. Besides, I have limited time to spend on art each day: I don’t want to spend it on exercises that bore me, which would cost me “playing with paint” time.

Nobody can be good at everything. Art is a huge category encompassing a ton of skills. Heck, just watercolor is a huge category that encompasses a ton of skills and styles. Every artist has strengths and weaknesses; nobody’s strength is “everything.” Everyone has to choose what they are going to specialize in, so why not specialize in something you love?

You improve just the same, whether you’re doing stuff you love or doing stuff you hate. And doing stuff you love requires no willpower, no work ethic, no forcing yourself. It’s not just one more thing on the to-do list. It’s not even a reward: it’s a rest, a respite.

For most of us, art is a hobby: why shouldn’t it be easy and fun? Why shouldn’t it be relaxing and healing? Isn’t that what it’s for?

Resolving to have less resolve

As hard as I come out swinging against the Puritan work ethic, it’s part of me and I find myself falling back into it. New Year’s is an especially fraught time. I noticed in my year-end retrospective that my 2024 resolutions were all pretty Puritan: focused on improving areas where I felt I fell short, forcing myself to use tools I don’t like, and forbidding things that I enjoyed. Whoof! Of course, I didn’t do any of them, which is all for the best.

This year my only traditional resolution is to sign my paintings (which seems like a pretty reasonable one to accomplish, and one that if anything flies in the face of my perfectionism by insisting that it’s all worth signing). But I also think it might be worth resolving to formally embrace this mantra, “only do what is easy and fun.”