The most important service you can do yourself as a painter is to avoid the modern mechanized and intellectual method of making work and go back to the more organic classical method which develops an inner life of it's own that you then simply document as you experience it. Real time, real life, and real evolution reside in the development of a living process: an evolving interface between you and the universe. If you allow anything else into your process, no matter how much it may appear to help you (in terms of some form of external success, as a rule) ultimately there will be a deterioration of the integrity of your process, the lines of communication become fouled by compromise, and the Muses depart. If you want to make art which is real in the deepest sense you must be willing and able to access all the contradictions and complexities of your own equation and develop various solutions to this equation through your work. The requirements of this are integrity, commitment, and a clean, north-lighted place: you are the puzzle, you solve it through your work, and this, nothing else, is actually art and actually valuable. This is the walk, the rest is just the talk, and a lot of very big empty talk it is too! As a painter you will need to be in the art world, but not of it. This is precarious, but possible. Contact with the art world will inevitably create confusion - excitement, disappointment, it's all confusion - but your process will resolve this confusion by sifting the false from the true. This is why it's important to have a process which works from the internal to the external, rather than the reverse. This way your process is a counterbalance to external pressure, constantly bringing you back to your center.
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In Eastern culture the idea of a living process is built into traditional Zen Buddhist training in the arts; although in practice this can be relatively severe in Western terms because the student's spirit is typically first broken in order to be re-formed in a more enlightened way. (In Japan this is understood as integral to the process). In Western culture the ideas I've found most relevant date from the teachings of Pythagoras and the group of Greek philosophers called the Pre-Socratics. The Greek words which became our word philosopher can be translated as friend/lover/affiliate of wisdom. The goal of a living process is not the development of a career first, but the development of wisdom first. The trick is to have enough of a career to stay in one piece, but not so much that it interferes with your actual development. As art history makes clear, it's possible to have a very successful career as a painter without actually making any real art, and it's also possible to make lots of real art and be a total temporal failure. The ideal is to meet the culture half-way or hopefully less; just far enough to be able to continue to work safely. If this makes you nervous consider another offical career for a specific length of time while developing your work in private. On the other hand, this can develop a somewhat inflated sense of economic safety: if you are a starving artist from day one, you'll become unusually resilient and resourceful because there won't be any choice. In the end it depends on how adventurous you feel like being with your life. In my experience the Gods seem to smile unswervingly upon daring with purpose as long as it doesn't mutate into arrogance, which they respond to swiftly without mercy. (This is art, not politics).
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Just as color emulates light through the interaction of red, yellow, and blue, the context of a living process is a triangle. The points of this triangle are the idea or intellect, the feeling or intuition, and the craft or technique. Just as the three primaries need to be in balance to give us the illusion of light, these three aspects of a process need to be active and communicating before it will live. The most difficult aspect of this trio to address effectively is feeling or intuition because the modern environment has militated so vigorously against it. But it is just this element which the modern enviornment needs to create a way out of it's techno-intellectual cul-de-sac.
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A living process works by simply emulating the multi-dimensional nature of universal creativity. The linear nature of the modern process - idea, technique, execution - is replaced by one in which many related pairs of opposite concepts interact, producing a limitless spiral of growth and the potential for the personality to be mirrored and developed much more accurately. Just as we have intrinsic opposites such as day/night and male/female built into our world, there are intrinsic opposites in painting such as warm/cool, bright/dull, thin/thick, transparent/opaque, etcetera. By working conciously with this concept it is possible to produce a situation where your process is always growing: the Greeks developed this as the idea of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, although there's evidence that these ideas originally came from Egypt . If you do an analysis of your process you'll see that it's actually a set of decisions you've made about where you prefer to be within any given opposition: you like bright color, but not uncut color, for example, placing you closer to bright than dull, but not all the way over. By developing awareness of where our preferences lie it is possible to begin to alter them systematically by trying specific different patterns of preferences. The shift in emphasis is from the manufacture of product to the development of process. While this may take a while to put together, the irony here is that once your process is up and running, product then simply takes care of itself.
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To begin this method simply look at what you're doing and analyse it in terms of opposites. Then start asking what happens if you move some of your positions around. The trick with this method is not to judge one pole of an opposition as better than the other but hold each as equally valid but different. This creates a short-circuiting of linear (yes/no) thought which in turn creates the opportunity for something new to appear. No, it's not magic, you're just getting in touch with the multi-dimensional nature of universal creativity. For example, if black-and-white is the opposition, gray would be the compromise but color would be the new idea, the next dimension. The idea here is to get off the line that leads to compromise, to force the equation upward by acknowledging both aspects of a given duality. This creates an equilateral triangle, the ancient symbol for this process and not coincidentally an exact description of how light creates dimension.
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What you will find as you begin to implement these ideas is that your comfort zone becomes very challenged: you're not "good" anymore because you're into a large amount of new territory all at once. You may encounter a time where you don't like your old method but don't really have a new one. The first round of this is the most intense because you'll be looking at all aspects of what you're doing. Then things will settle down at a new level for a while, only to get stirred up again in time, but now a bit less. The changes themselves may be just as great or greater, but you'll be more used to making them, less defensive of the old, readier for the new. This process really speeds up when you begin to see the pattern of your changes and can anticipate their next move: although they may surprise you sometimes too! A living process can't be controlled: like a child walking a large dog you simply follow it wherever it wants to go.
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One thing you'll notice as you become more comfortable working with opposites in your painting is that you begin to notice other applications for this process: just as life informs art, art informs life. You'll simply feel the interaction of opposites intuitively and may find the distinctions between art and life become harder to define because you're approaching both in the same way. When this happens you have an especially living process, and can congratulate yourself on having beaten the system permanently: operating as your own truth, you cannot be subverted, you cannot be duped. But, having accomplished this, you'll find yourself inevitably placed outside the realm of most human behavior since it won't make any sense to you at all. The quandary is whether to abandon humanity -- since it has, after all, chosen it's insanity -- or try to help it, since it obviously doesn't know what on earth it's doing. The initial response of course is to try to help, to share this great sense of creative freedom that is after all everyone's birthright, but creative freedom is a great responsibility which not everyone wants to undertake. So, as is very typical of life and art, having solved one level of the puzzle you're on the the next one. I can't supply much in the way of answers here except to urge you to exercise caution: the freedom which you embody at this level is very important to the development of humanity but it is impossible to hide and tends to polarize those who encounter it much more than appearances will lead you to believe.
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