Honing Our Art Skills - Following Others

  To learn any new subject, we need to spend time to hone our skills.  We usually are too loose and free or too tight and restricted.  The first usually causes many accidents and the other greatly restricts the capacity that is hidden in the soul.  To hone our skills means that we need to restrict or build up one area of our learning and open up the innate abilities in another part of our being and let them fly.  Artists tend to be unbalanced at first, so it is good to follow others and practice what is learned from them exactly, but at the same time digging deeper in and finding the place where something innate is buried and teaching it to use its wings by the things learned from others.  Without our own wings, our soul never carries us in our artwork.  Without the discipline that comes from learning from others we never really learn to do things well.  Explore, experiment, learn who to follow.

Daisy in Spring Grass
digital