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     One of the more compelling reasons many of us paint is to hopefully experience a higher state of consciousness. Indeed, time for calm and focus have become a necessity more than ever lately.... for me anyway. There's a lot of different descriptions for what, I think, are fundamentally a similar thing. Athletes often refer to 'the zone', a meditator might call it awareness or being in the moment. What I try to practice in my studio seems more like wandering. It feels a lot like when I was a kid walking home from school through some of the empty fields -- moseying along picking up pop bottles and stopping to investigate whatever triggered my curiosity.

     In one of John Steinbeck's books* he mentions a Spanish word, vacilando, with no direct translation to English but it was explained sort of like this; You have a destination in mind but you don't particularly care whether you get there or not. That always struck me as the state of mind I aspire to get to when I'm painting. Not that it's always easy to turn off the chatter in my brain of what I should be doing or what someone wants/hopes/thinks I'll be doing. It gets easier with practice though! Even a few minutes of wandering can make all the difference in how the day goes, and therefore, unstructured time is what I consider to be a treasured commodity.

     Everyone is different, but there are a few habits I've adopted over the years that work for me -- keeping my life simple (easier said than done) , not overcommitting, working well ahead of deadlines, and not taking on commissions. Some, or all of these, were admittedly learned the hard way.  I buy quality archival materials but don't go for paints and canvases so expensive I'm intimidated to use them. For as long as possible after putting down the first strokes, I try to avoid thinking ahead to the final product. I always have a destination in mind, but  I tell myself it's OK if I don't get there. Rarely do I show anyone a painting in progress and more often than not, nobody but me sees what I've done before it goes out to a gallery. All of these are my ways of dialing down the pressure, because that is what makes it possible for me to just wander. Of course I'm always striving to improve and capture a more perfect vision, but as long as I don't allow myself to become overly critical, that's still compatible with following my curiosity wherever it takes me. I'm not trying to say all pressure is bad. Off in the distance pressure does keep me on track. Knowing I'll lose the light and need to speed up a little can actually help most of the time. 

      These moments of bliss aren't the only reason I go to all this trouble to protect my wandering time though. Another important reason I work in this way is because I'm more likely to achieve the qualities in my paintings that I'm aiming for.  My goal is to be totally absorbed in solving the puzzle of that particular composition and how to best capture the vision before it fades. If I'm always looking ahead to the finished painting, or the next painting, or off into the future somewhere, my concentration just isn't as targeted and by splitting my attention I never get to the same kind of focus that produces the results I want. When one eye is looking down the road, that only leaves me one eye left to watch what I'm doing. Both eyes on what I'm doing is when the magic happens. Perhaps this is why I've always especially loved this quote from The Art Spirit; 

      " The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable."  -- Robert Henri 

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*from  Travels With Charlie:In Search of America  by John Steinbeck

"In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counter word in English. It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando. It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn't greatly care whether he gets there or not, although he has direction."