From patience to presence

How to stay the course

Hello friends

It’s been a quiet day, one of modest tasks accomplished. I try to be glad of small wins. A few decent sentences written. A bill paid. An email answered. A drawing finished. Some new paintings begun. But I’m fretful and restless. The roiling of world events goes on like a constant noise, like the wind that has been booming in the chimney all week. You can tune it out for a while but the moment you open a door it all comes rushing in at you, fit to knock you off your feet.

The steadiness of habit can be an anchor in such times. I am really noticing the power of habit and routine to support my creative practice, more so since that habit has been weakened by being out of my studio for almost a month while I was in Edinburgh during the exhibition In Orcadia at the Royal Scottish Academy. It’s taking longer than I anticipated to regain momentum.

Four of my paintings in the galleries of the Royal Scottish Academy last month.

It takes more effort to re-establish a habit than to maintain one, but this past week I have been re-establishing the creative habit, rebuilding momentum, finding my ground in tumultuous times. Painting, or perhaps more accurately, drawing is my anchor, my refuge, a practice that steadies and grounds me. And what provides the space for habit to form (or re-form) is a schedule: chunks of time consciously set aside and defended from other tasks, no matter how pressing or worthy. As Annie Dillard famously wrote:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”

― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Taking a break from working on ‘Haar’

And while I recognise that creativity takes many forms and neurodiverse minds may find other ways to flourish, one way or another, we need to carve out time for creative work or it simply doesn’t happen.

In my case, I need to carve out quite big chunks of time. The one question everyone wants to ask me about my paintings is ‘How long do they take?’ The answer is that I’ve stopped measuring the time in terms of hours, days or weeks. Measuring time in the studio like this was, I realised, at once demoralising and irrelevant. At the exhibition preview the comment I heard most often was ‘You must be so patient!’

But it isn’t really a question of patience. It’s a question of presence.

My partner runs marathons. He says when he’s doing a long training run and his legs are dragging there’s nothing to be gained from dreaming of the finish line that feels so far away. It just makes your legs feel even heavier. He says you just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, inhabit the rhythm of it and stay in the moment. He says it’s the only way to keep your momentum steady when you’re feeling tired and discouraged. Being simply present to every footfall as it comes is how you stay the course, not fixing on the goal or outcome you wish to achieve.

So, no matter the noise that comes from outside, whatever the work is that you’re drawn to offer in these times, whatever marathon you’re running, keep putting one foot in front of the other. Make time for it in your schedule and stick to it. Keep putting those words down on the page. Keep drawing your circles, lines, layers. Keep making, connecting, sharing.

Move from patience to presence. Resist the pull of finishing. Inhabit the all the different qualities of time. Come back to the rhythm of work, the simplicity of breath, the light on the water flickering, clouds moving through like thoughts. Release the grip on tomorrow, with all of its hopes and fears and ominous signs. Right here there’s a stillness in the midst of movement, a silence within the noise. It feels like coming home.

It’s not until I stop and step back to look at the drawing that I can see what’s been accumulating. All those tiny, momentary gestures have slipped away, but here I see they have left their tracks, set down in ink or paint or words. What appears is not so much a quantity of time as a quality, a feeling. A kind of richness or saturation has been achieved.

Cloud Moon Wave, at the finish line, 2024, 110 cm x 180 cm

Moment by moment, in a slow accretion, time gathers. A moment becomes a lifetime. Duration becomes the experience of time felt inwardly. Each act of making becomes a small act of quiet resistance to all the noisy unmaking that’s going on around us.

I am so thankful to those of you who have been in touch to say how much they enjoyed seeing my paintings at the Royal Scottish Academy. It really means a lot to know that my patient efforts have been appreciated. In these weekly Life Boat missives I try to share the ideas, places, books, conversations and yes, habits, that go into shaping my paintings. I hope you’ll stay with me along the way towards the new body of work I’m starting on.

The Life Raft Co-Creating Community

Make time in your schedule for your creative work. Join us for our weekly creative co-working session on Zoom. It’s very simple. We just say hello at the start and say what we plan to work on and then leave our cameras on and work together in companionable silence. We start at 3pm UK time and finish around 4.30pm. If you come late and we’ve already begun work it disrupts the quiet focus, so do try and join us promptly or you won’t be admitted, sorry! I’ll share a recording to the paid subscriber chat.

That’s all for now!

Sam