ADAM SHAW

Adam's Rules for Making Paintings

(Remember: rules are meant to be broken, but these are guidelines if you want to take your work to the next level. I'm not here to argue. I'm making an offering. Take them or leave them as you please.)

1. Always take the long way.

It's easy to get luminous color right out of the tube, and it's easy to make something that looks good in a short amount of time. It's not so easy to push those luminous colors into dirt and retrieve the luminosity, but it's worth it. Because then you have history. Make it a habit of painting over beautiful things that come too easy. In the long run it will be saccharine. Go for honey.

2. Be willing to sacrifice beauty for the possibility of greater beauty.

Sometimes when making a painting, as it evolves, you might have a particularly beautiful area that no longer suits what the painting has become. Paint over it. A painting should cost you something; it should have sacrifice built into it.

3. Be a disciplined risk taker.

It's okay to fall on your face. It's okay to ruin a painting you love. Otherwise, there's a certain point you will never get past. Sometimes you will regret it. That's okay. Suffering the loss will make your work deeper and more serious.

4. Work all the time.

If you don't know what to do on a particular painting, put it aside and work on something else. Your subconscious mind will continue to work on the pieces you put aside, even if it takes months or years until your patience, labor and discipline allow the painting to reveal itself.

5. Work regardless of how and what you're feeling.

It's common for artists to equate their work with their feelings. That's fine if you wish, but honestly no one really cares about your feelings, at least as far as your work is concerned. They care about the quality of the work. A disciplined professional works no matter what their feelings are.

6. Try to understand what your work is about.

The more clearly you can define what your work is about,- first, to yourself, and then to others,- the further you will go, because you will be able to incorporate more of yourself into the work. When you know what you're doing, and why, you'll go deeper into your own voice and vision.

7. Live a life in service to your work.

I don't think there have been too many great artists for whom their work was not the most important thing in their lives. In fact, at some point your work has to become synonymous with your life. Put another way, your work must become a matter of life and death.

8. Love what you do, totally, completely and always. Even when you hate it, love it.

Adore the activity itself and everything about it: the materials, the physicality, the mystery, the being in service-ness of it, the play, the seriousness, the meaninglessness, the freedom, the discipline, the frustration, the struggle, the focus, the openness.

9. Don't keep making the same painting. And don't settle.

Get comfortable living with varying degrees of glorious dissatisfaction. Master letting your reach exceed or grasp, or your work is DOA. If you've figured something out and keep repeating it, your work is DOA. If you're merely making a variation on somebody else's painting, your work is DOA.

10. Do NOT let anyone tell you what to paint.

Especially if they have a financial interest in your career. Yes, very much listen to and consider everything they say, weigh and measure it, but don't let them tell you what to paint. If you paint to the market, it might help you make a living which we all have to do. But if your wish is to make great work, or original work, or just honest work --which is not very easy, making honest work, because that means that only you can make it,-- if that's your wish as an artist, you have to be careful about listening to what others say. I would suggest listening to everything everyone says, but with a certain degree of interested indifference.  Take praise and criticism in the same way, which means receive it, but don’t be affected by either. Maybe you'll be lucky, and you'll find someone, or a few someones, who really see and can talk about your work. It's incredibly rare and a real treasure. You'll know it when you meet them.