the benefits of overdoing it
fuel for your fire
I started the painting above a few weeks ago, inspired by the idea of a gondola car against a mountain landscape. After many painting sessions and multiple layers of paint, I completed the painting. At times I almost gave up and started again by covering it all over with burnt umber mixed with mars black, the dark brown color I use for priming canvases. But I kept squeezing more paint onto my palette—adding raw umber mixed with white and then a bit of Prussian blue added to that—rotating the canvas, stepping back and looking and then painting more, and more, and more until it turned into something I loved.
I don’t know before I start what I’m going to paint. And I don’t know how many painting sessions and how much paint it will take me to arrive at a painting that I consider complete. In this case, I was inspired by a photo of a gondola at Vail, but the gondola motif is long gone. I’m pleased with the more sophisticated color scheme I arrived at, and I like the vertical format. To me, it evokes the emotionally steep experience of returning to the top of Dercum Mountain after hitting Keystone’s backside runs.1
overwriting in order to explore
Fiction writer Ling Ma, in a conversation with Jess Focht, says she overwrites:
Focht: Does it take you many drafts to reach this level of prose? I’m curious about your drafting process, in general.
Ma: Yeah, definitely. At least for Severance, it was a 40,000 word document of scenes that I had tried out and cut. With the short stories, too, I tend to overwrite and try things out. It’s just a way of inhabiting the stories. At one point when I was writing Bliss Montage, my editor came over and visited Chicago. I don’t know why, but I felt really pressured to show her that I had done work, so I showed her. In my closet, there were six different stacks of packets. Basically, each stack was a short story. I would put the newest draft on top every couple of weeks. Some stories had 15 different drafts. I usually don’t know the ending until the end, though. So, I guess I write really chronologically in that way.
Ma uses quantity creativity to produce her surreal and engaging fiction. She’s a pantser, not a plotter. A pantser writes by the seat of her pants while a plotter carefully outlines and plans.
I’m a pantser when it comes to painting, but I prefer to call myself an “intuitive” painter, because it’s a nicer word and maybe more descriptive of how I create. I paint not by analysis but by feeling my way forward, step by step. I don’t plan out my colors or my composition or even the subject, though I might start with some vague inspiration in my mind, like the gondola car that initiated my painting of Ruby Express. I let the art emerge in the action of mixing paint, applying it to the canvas, stepping back and looking at it, and repeating, over and over again. I do use a repetitive set of steps, however, one which applies to many paintings.2
This approach means that I overpaint. I paint way too much, way more than it seems I should have to based upon the body of work that I deem ready to share with the world. You wouldn’t believe how many painted canvases I have stored in my house. You wouldn’t believe how many different paintings live on a single canvas of mine, artistic strata representing a history of my drive to create.
moderation sometimes
Aristotle considered moderation one of the moral virtues, and defined virtue as a mean between extremes. Many modern-day self-help authors suggest you should not do too much or work too fast. Maybe you shouldn’t do anything at all!
In other words: Don’t overdo it!
And I agree with this in many areas. I’ve found it best not to overdo drinking for example, and I try to keep consumption of carbs pretty low, because the more I eat them the hungrier I get. I prefer not to watch too much television or spend too much time on Twitter either. I’ve given up on dating and relationships, for now, because I overdid it in the ten years after my divorce.
fuel for the fire
Curiously, the more I paint, the less I feel the need to engage in activities that are bad for me, like overdrinking or overdating or over-Twerting.3
In Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, novelist and memoirist Elizabeth Gilbert writes, “Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do, and you might not like the job it invents.”
This reminds me of advice I received from a Montessori teacher about my son H when he was twelve years old. We had recently moved to Hawaii from Virginia, and I was concerned about how H would adapt to his new school and new life. We had heard from teachers starting from preschool that he needed work on his “coping skills.” He would get frustrated and overwhelmed and lose his cool.
At the first parent-teacher conference with the teacher in Hawaii I asked how he was doing. “Just great!” the teacher said. “He needs plenty of fuel for the fire, otherwise he misbehaves.” In his case, he needed more intellectual stimulation. More books to read, more math to do, more puzzles to solve.
If you find yourself misbehaving in some way—overdoing weed or drink or online shopping, acting irritably with people you love, failing to keep your life on track—maybe you need more fuel for the fire. Is there something creative (or intellectual, or physical, or social) you should be doing? Is there something you should be overdoing?
Anne Zelenka is a painter and photographer. She lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado with her mother, two cats, and a dog. She overblogs at The Reinvention Project, a daily journal of the yearlong reinvention project she started in April of 2024, when she left her career as a data scientist.
I went back and rode Ruby Express after completing this painting. The vista looks nothing like this. But it feels like this to me.
My favorite step in creating these paintings is adding a scribbly line with black china marker. I do it only once the colors and composition have come together into something I love. The curved lines on Ruby Express make me think of carving turns on an intermediate groomer, though I note they are too squashed to represent good form.
I coined the word “Twerting” to mean reading Twitter without posting anything. Such a waste of time! And pretty toxic too. As part of my effort to reduce my social media usage, I’ve blocked Twitter except for one hour each afternoon using the Chrome extension StayFocusd.