I have a sticky-note with 3 reminders, every time I sit down to draw:

1) Perception-Free
2) Kill the Ego
3) For the Sake of the Art

Pretty damn sappy. But I don’t care. This list has kept me honest about my goals and has served to re-seat my consciousness each time I started to sway or stray. It's become invaluable lately, in fact.

When we deal with the creation of something, there’s a lot of things that can get in the way to distract or wreak havoc with the process of creation. Bad enough we have to train ourselves to step out of the standard bounds of daily life, only to face the occasional nuisance of inner demons.

So it’s an escape, really. It’s the one time we have to ourselves, to play with the universe without real consequence, and we can’t do that with our eyes anchored within the 4 walls of our studios, or our minds kludging through self-consciousness and ego. Really, we just need to let the waves of creativity flow unrestrained and unfettered.

Sometimes this is a “no-brainer”. Sometimes it isn’t.


When I sit down to work, I make a pact with myself. It’s very subtle, but it’s crucial. I promise myself that for the duration I am there, nothing will interrupt me from the point I started the piece to the point that I take a break, or it is done. Everything else from the outside world is neutralized; I lock the door, slam on my headphones (sometimes just for white noise), and I use the vacuum as my security blanket so that I have a clean void all around me, just waiting for things to materialize.

I do my damnedest to become a conduit, or a channel for whatever drives me onto the next outline or texture on each new page, no second-guessing or hesitation. Because I’m not doing this for my own sake. The art will have to stand on its own, whether I’m present or not. Art adopts its own vibes when it makes contact with the public and cultivates its own personality. So anything I create has to be a separate entity when it's done, in many senses of the word.

This is the same with almost any art we engage in or participate with, or produce. We're "drawing" from something that wasn’t physically there in the first place, and won’t physically be a part of ourselves afterwards (body-piercings and tattoos notwithstanding ). But that’s a groovy concept, to me, pulling something out of nothing-ness. There's some freedom of thought to that. The stranger it is, the cooler it is, the more eye-opening and appealing it is.

I'm over-simplyfing this, really, because as an artist I only want to focus on 2 things: the progress and the results, of the piece in question. As long as the work was steady through to the end, I'm typically content to let the piece go and "live" its existence while I move onto the next one.

Hence the sticky-note.