I’m a planner. I love mapping intentions and circling back to assess progress. I love capturing thinking within a process of articulating one’s intentions. I love being able to cross-off a list. It’s with these things in mind that I developed a learning plan template for my nine-month workshop, Painting Life / Painting Your Life. The template is intended to provide some structure to a long-term (the equivalent of an academic year), largely self-directed learning experience. It’s designed to be flexible and adapt to a range of learning needs and preferences. Built upon my twenty-year experience at Goddard College (RIP), it draws on a wealth of thinking about progressive education — and the liberation experienced when one ‘learns how to learn.’

In the spirit of progressive education, I’m using the template alongside the learners in my workshop (co-learning). I’ve mapped for myself three main learning goals for the nine-months of the workshop — 1.  Painting About Place; 2. Painting About People; and 3. Advancing My Understanding of Memoir. My goals and objectives, both for research and making, are aggressive. Now two months into it, I’m already behind what I’ve set for myself. 

My mistake, which is a qualified mistake, was not fully assessing the context into which I wrote my plan. I have a long list of studio obligations that I’m currently trying to power through. I’m facilitating four workshops this fall. And I didn’t take into account that I’d be sick for ten days. So I’ve done no writing over the past month, and only a little reading. I did take a poetry workshop. I haven’t started any new figurative work, although I am looking at figurative work with renewed interest. And while I haven’t undertaken the new work about place that I have percolating, I have made 39 landscape paintings in November. 

But those things aren’t the qualification of my mistake. The real issue is trying to put bold aspirations into a timeline that’s essentially based on an academic calendar. For years I told graduate students that it was foolish to suppose that you could create art within the confines of a semester — and that the ‘work’ is to chart one’s progress and process. The value of this moment for me isn’t ‘checking off a box,’ but rather that I’ve articulated a great set of aspirations. This isn’t to say that I’m giving up on accountability. Rather it’s an acknowledgement that I need to assess pace, consider my ability to focus and code-switch, and to be realistic about where aspiration grinds against obligation. And I have to accept the reality that my stamina isn’t that of a 35-year old anymore. I’m not running toward the end of a term, I’m opening the next act of my life. 

Behind all this planning is a nagging feeling that I’m stuck. I’m productive, but I’m not sure my creative work is advancing. I’m responding, but I’m not reflecting as much as I’d like. When I was 25, everyone pushed me to think about my career and to prepare for retirement. Now that I’m on the cusp of 60, I have no intention of retiring, and instead I’m thinking about the next 30 years. At 25 I wasn’t promised tomorrow, and I’m under no illusion that I’m guaranteed as much time as I’m planning for. Nevertheless, if I don’t plan for a useful and profound future it certainly won’t happen. As an artist it’s still quite possible that tomorrow’s work will be better than yesterdays — and that’s powerful incentive. 

So I’ve got a plan. And this is an attempt to chart my progress and process. 

More soon.