Just over 30 days ago I wrote a post about spending part of my lunch break making a small piece of art. A couple of days later I committed to making a small piece of art for at least 30 days. Yesterday I made my 30th piece of art and stuck it to the wall next to my desk.
If I’m honest (with myself), I’ve always considered myself to be an artist. Making art has always made things feel a little lighter; always nourished my soul. I got into art school off the back of my stack of sketchbooks. In practicing design, I’ve always believed that there’s art to it, despite the protests from peers in the design world.
Making art for myself over the past few years has felt like a luxury though. Something that I’d do if only I had more time; if only I was less tired. I’ll do it when I’m between jobs, I thought. I’ll do it when I get a free weekend. I’ll do it; I promise I’ll do it.
A few weeks ago, I looked down at a pile of things on my desk half-way through writing my morning pages, and my eyes rested on a book of poems that had made its way to the top of the pile: Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara. Frank wrote most of these poems whilst taking a lunch break during his day job at the MoMA in New York.
If Frank could do it, I wondered, why couldn’t I?
It turns out, of course, that I could. It turns out that we waste many more minutes a day on mindless nothingness that many of us could repurpose for something greater. That I could repurpose. I set myself some rules and got to work—every day for the past 30 days. If Frank had Lunch Poems, I had Lunch Makes. A small something, just for me.
The wonderful thing about committing to 30 days of something is that you don’t want to stop when the time comes—and I’m not going to. Making art every day feels like part of my day now. Part of my life. I think it would feel weird if I ended the day not having made something.
I did the same with morning pages, and have now written them every day for many months. I did the same with publishing daily blog posts, and I’m sat here writing a post that’s a good leap past number 30. All three things probably take me about an hour (collectively) each day, but they feel like such a big part of my life.
The small things add up. If I swivel my chair I’m faced with a wall of art. If I open my website my finger gets tired scrolling to the bottom. If I look at a graph of my journal, it feels like a complex galaxy. After a single day they all looked a little pathetic, but the days add up.
So, I’m adding art-making to the set of things that I do every day to nourish my soul, and to reconnect myself with the artist that I’ve always been. If you’ve been wanting to explore your art, take this as a nudge to start today—just with something small; just for you.