The Courage muscle

It’s easy to deflate yourself when you’re making art.

It’s not just art-making – it’s making anything, really if you are serious about doing it as your vocation. Honestly, you ask yourself, who really cares whether this works or not? The world will not stop spinning, the grass and the children will grow regardless of what happens here.

So you give up and do something else – or I do. Especially yesterday when I discovered the answer to “how come every time I come back to this painting from the far end of the studio I’ve forgotten what I was going to do?”. I figured it out while I was uploading old paintings onto this page, from 10 years ago: I’m 50, and my eyes are NOT what they used to be. I have trifocals, music glasses (stand distance), and I should have reading glasses too, but I don’t. Now I’ll get them. They’d be entirely helpful…