September 5, 2023

I’ve never done this before

I’ve never done this before is a scary thing to have to admit. Because, if you’ve never done it before how do you know you’ll be any good (or even competent?) If you’ve never done it before, how do you plan? how do you reduce risk? how do you decide that it’s the right thing to do?

I’ve recently agreed to take part in a charity art auction that requires me to do a 1.5×1.5m canvas painting in a medium I’m unfamiliar with. I’ve never done this before.

Doing things you’ve done before is safe. You’ve made mistakes and have since corrected them. You’ve understood your limits, and the limits of the materials you’ve worked with. You know what not to repeat, and what to do again.

But, at some point, the thing you know how to do so well now was a thing you never did before. That could be about making art, sure, or it could also be about making pizza, meeting a new person, visiting a new city, or simply sleeping on a different side of the bed.

If almost everything we know how to do was something we had never done before and, most of the time, it’s worked out OK, then maybe we owe it to ourselves to try the new thing we’ve been putting off. After all, doing things we’ve never done before, whilst scary, can also unlock new pathways and passions in our lives that we’ve also never had before.

Other observations
December 31, 2024

A conversation with a pencil

If a pencil could talk, what would it say to you? Nothing, I suspect, if you don’t use it.

December 24, 2024

I believe in you

Are there any set of words that one human can say to another that have a more profound effect than these?

December 17, 2024

A siren’s song

Social media is a siren’s song – of scale, of connection, of ‘monetisation’, of a valuable way to spend time. Might there be a better way?

December 10, 2024

Building muscles

No one expects me to run a marathon if I can’t even run 5km but when it comes to art, do we also need to build muscle?

December 3, 2024

It’s never felt more like work

Should picture book making feel like work? Or should it feel like some utopia where someone pays me for ‘art’?

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