A mental list occurs during my Towsley Canyon High
oil painting
18 x 24 inches involvement with the piece. If all is going well I am functioning with what would appear to be both sides of my brain - the more emotive side as well as the practical and technical. While I am in this place it feels like balancing on a tight wire with ease and knowing. Miraculous actually, because I am never totally sure when and how this happens, but something within me takes over. My check list includes: Passion, Power, Brains, Courage and Love. When I finish a piece and think about my list, if it is a successful painting it usually fits the bill. I have found this list all encompassing. Others like the "Big MAC" theory (Mystery, Ambiguity and Contrast), which I tried for a while sometimes feels forced, but still have merit. But as you said it is a personal list. You know when you are satisfied.

Isaacs' letter in the Snake and apples
original painting last clickback contains some explosive phrasing which I feel I must comment on. This good lady speaks of "supermarket" painting and "worthless" pieces of work as opposed by that "we professionals" do. This is the "sour grapes syndrome" (abbrev. SGS) that causes less lucky or less successful artists to believe that their paintings are being ousted from the market by these wall decorations. SGS is a plague, of course. It besets us all now and again, such as when we visit a gallery and it is festooned with dozens of paintings we could (and should?) have painted ourselves. But this is not a reason for denigrating what is there. It's the way the cookie crumbles.

Regarding "Practitioners Towne Pastiche (work in progress)
watercolour painting can have the eerie feeling of watching themselves work," I get this feeling! When I sit down I feel awkward and am too much in my head and thoughts (this sounds crazy),then I pick up the pencil or brush and just make myself start. Before long a feeling comes over me that the brush or pencil is doing its own thing - that's not quite right, it's difficult to explain, but I feel as though I relax into working without getting bogged down with conscious thought. It flows. It is my right-brain being allowed free reign while the left takes a break. I think the feeling you describe comes from the left brain, which is indeed just watching the art being created. Children do this naturally - if you ever watched a child making something, they are totally absorbed and in the moment. It's a shame that we tend to lose this ability as we get older, probably because we get told so often that we must concentrate. It's great to let the inner child out to play.

I love the checklist and the summary of the 14 points ! To get me there, I have one to add: "Show up and do the work!" It is from Julia Cameron of The Artist's Way . Tied to this is her other one: "I'll take care of the quantity, God will take care of the quality!" This, to me, seems to smack of "Anything goes," I don't have to worry about knowing anything. Quite the reverse! Showing up and turning out the work day after day, and then using God's (the Spirit's, the Muse's) help and my own knowledge is the idea. But, if I get bogged down in "what I know" and "what I don't know," I'll never get to the cycle of growth that is excellence. As I show up at my easel today, I'll tack up your lists for reminders of that quality!

The first item on your check list is for me the most significant..."Paint with your eyes." I would add 'and think with your eyes.' To be involved with more than that while painting clutters the mind. When you let your eyes guide your hand you are in direct contact with your intuition, everything you know and have seen becomes a willing participant, and you are in "the zone." Certainly the mind can jump around all over the place while at the easel, therefore, don't clutter it up with more thought. When it comes to choosing a color, where to put it, or how much of it to use and what "touch" to give it, that should be determined by the eye. The visual world is silent. You don't need words or thought to observe it. But you do need to direct your eyes to see it. You need to "take your time," as suggested by the last item on your check list.

Great checklist. I just came
Artist Raynold Murphy speaking at the Festival des Artisans de Sainte-Marcelline
Fantasia: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Preliminary study)
oil painting
by Claude Coats (1940) back from visiting the exhibition "Once Upon a Time Walt Disney--the sources of inspiration for the Disney studios" at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (which also was at Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais , Paris last year). One thing became clear to me about the figurative artists hired by Disney. They were trained in the classic beaux-arts tradition and they drew day after day. They produced superb work. There is no secret to getting better in order to produce great works. All the courses, books, tricks and check lists will surely help, but it is in the daily doing of art that one improves and succeeds.

There's an interesting dual list in a book called Brush Mind , by Kazuaki Tanahashi. Mr. Tanahashi does Japanese brush painting inspired by Zen Buddhism, often using ink and a huge mop which he slathers over long sheets of paper stretched across his studio floor. He has "abandoned concrete forms, colors, shades, nuance, refinement, and the attempt to please, as well as the use of a seal or signature." In his list he compares the pen (traditional?) paradigm to the brush paradigm. By conditioning I'm a 'pen' painter, struggling to become more of a 'brush' artist so I have this pinned on the studio wall.

pen lines
clear-cut
geometric
mechanical
one-directional
repeatable
analyzable
predetermined
obvious
rational
dualistic
perfect

brush lines
irregular
flexible
organic
multi-directional
unique
complex
spontaneous
ambiguous
mysterious
all-inclusive
whole

I know exactly what Man with a light
linocut print you mean by the eerie feeling of watching oneself at work. While away from my home studio for a few months I had started two paintings, working in a windowless concrete storage space. When I returned, the paintings sat there on their easels like dead animals. My galleries were asking for work and I had nothing. It wasn't a voluntary temporary stepping out of the "zone," as you suggest, a deliberate arrest from the work's progress. Rather it was like I had been exiled from it. Permanently. The flow had become stagnant, and it lasted several weeks. I finally decided these images were not only dead but starting to rot, so I began to paint them out-- but then the destructive act of negating the images became a creative act of transforming them into something entirely new and unexpected. It wasn't a premeditated thing, just playing around with imagery from something I heard on the radio about the death of John Keats in the first painting, and in the second from a vision out of nowhere of a black crow turning into a negative of itself--a white one. The new imagery didn't destroy the old as I had intended, but merged with it and transformed it into some entirely new and surprising to me. I think when I get stuck it's because I have ceased to be surprised by own work. For me, it's not so much sticking to a checklist as surrendering to that other self, allowing that other self to reveal itself. Felix Mendelssohn had a kind of checklist that works for me: "This is what I think art is and what I demand of it: that it pull everyone in, that it show one person another's most intimate thoughts and feelings, that it throw open the window of the soul."

I love checklists of all sorts,
I love the night
written and illustrated by Dar Hosta but I think that they can be tricky business when exchanged from one artist to another. I am pleased to see the transformation of your own checklist from one that was pretty academic and didactic to one that is certainly more philosophical and open-ended. I would agree that the world at large looks to artists for these kinds of lists when they begin their own artistic explorations, particularly in a classroom or workshop.

After a couple years of teaching classroom workshop sessions I noticed that, after my introduction to the project, the hands would immediately raise up with these exact words: "Are we allowed to..." The more tightly governed the class was by their teacher, the more the children would ask. The so-called High Achievers were the chock full of "are we allowed to..." Obviously, the word "allowed" is the stickler here and has no business in creative expression. The "rule" I now make after my introduction to the project is, "You are not allowed to ask me any questions." Once they get over the strangeness of not being totally directed in every part of their school day, the beauty, creativity and inspired expression begins to flow...

I find the concept of "checklists" mutually Melchior
mixed media doll exclusive with creativity and/or the act of doing art, i.e. any act of painting, drawing, sculpting. I subscribe to the right-brain / left-brain concept where doing art is a function of the non-verbal right brain. Checklists involve words, and language is a left-brain activity. If you're doing art, you can't think in words because you're in your right brain. If you're thinking words and remembering checklists, you're not there. Checklists are just another aspect of rules. You learn them verbally, think about them, understand what they mean, and then absorb them. They are tools/skills that must become instinctive. When you start to paint/sculpt/draw/whatever, they must not be consciously present. Notice I do not say that rules and checklists are a waste of time or an obstacle to creativity. Quite the opposite! I learned long ago that the foundation of creativity is discipline.

I'm glad you're willing to share the wisdom California promise
oil painting of maturity and the contrasting lists. Your work ethic and experience has taken you to a fabulous place... right into your heart. The head has to be engaged for a time, and then the heart takes the driver's seat, or lets 'something else' do the driving and you go along for the ride! I love the quotes from Marry your Muse by Jan Phillips: "Art is a collaboration between God and artist, and the less the artist does, the better." (Andre Gide) "'When Spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art." (Leonardo da Vinci) and "I dream my painting and paint my dream." (Vincent Van Gogh)

I ask for your opinion or advice regarding artists' Baskets galore
watercolor painting integrity, and I get a 'checklist'? This is a matter of great concern with a great number of artists in this day and age, what with digital art floating around and giclees being entered in juried competitions.

(RG note) Thanks, Don. Don is irked that artists copy the work of others and put it into competitions, galleries, shows—and even have it reproduced. I've tackled the insidious problem before and I'm afraid I don't have a general answer that might make everything rosy again. According to some copyright lawyers we may be witnessing the end of copyright. The digital revolution is a handmaiden to this destruction. All of us who teach, mentor, display, demo, blog and publish set ourselves up for the infringement of our work. Unfortunately, all cases must be fought on an individual basis, by protest, public embarrassment or legal action.

Regarding your recent correspondence Symphony for the moon
oil painting about working with galleries, there can be downsides to a gallery relationship. Here in Vancouver artists have had a particularly vexing time with a series of galleries run by one Sergio Patrich. The situation has heated up again with Patrich's recent unannounced exit from the gallery business and the disappearance of the artists' work. He has not resurfaced. The local and national press have been researching, interviewing and preparing to publish articles about Sergio Patrich's history of deceiving artists and business owners. And now it looks like we have a lawyer who wants to take this further on a larger scale, ie: a class action suit.

(RG note) Thanks, Brittani. I, too, have had characters like him—one, who also had no apparent assets, had put all his property into his son's name, but when we put a lien on the son's house we suddenly got paid in full. Other artists weren't so lucky, but the guy is thankfully out of the business, now selling used cars as far as I know, and will never get back in. Ten artists and their goons marching in and just taking the work is a good ploy, but the Internet is now a useful vehicle to keep undesirable people out of the art business. Let artists be on notice these sorts of incompetent dealers exist and need to be closed down. In the case of Patrich, artists and others have banded together in a valuable website stating their experiences. It's a system that ought to be carried out in other areas where the problem exists. It's well worth looking at.