WHAT REPETITION OFFERS US AS ARTISTS

As artists, we work in many ways—abstractly, representationally, conceptually—and one of the common drivers in our exploration is to discover more clearly what our work is about.

We are seeking a deeper understanding of our voice as an artist and how to articulate that. We want to be able to express through our work what feels important to us. We desire to make meaningful pieces that communicate clearly, yet leave room for the viewer's experience.

Essentially, we want a deeper connection to our truth and to allow that to come through our work, even if that isn't always fully known to us.

Over the many years of working with artists, I've come to understand that some of the most challenging struggles we face are these aspects of finding ourselves in our work, and trusting that it is enough to bring to our art. This struggle can cause us to feel lost, devoid of meaning, and resistant to making our work. Apathy can set in as we circle around this conundrum—it simply becomes too hard to face what art-making is asking of us.

What is surprising about this challenge is that what we're seeking is also seeking us. Our art is continually reflecting back to us what we need to know and face in order to grow and access more of our truthful, authentic expression. The trick is to trust this place, and allow it to guide us…and one of the ways we do this is through repetition and revisitation.

When we stay with something long enough, and reiterate an idea or an approach to our art-making, we get closer to actually seeing what is there. We go deeper as the familiarity grows and connects us. The path into the work feels less arduous because we know the way to begin. Many of the initial decisions that can take up a lot of our creative energy are already decided for us, leaving us space to focus on the other, more nuanced aspects of our work—the meaning, and the way that meaning is being communicated.

If we can meet our work with the question, "What else is possible?" we invite ourselves to discover what has not yet shown up in the work, but is part of the connective tissue that holds it together. By staying focused on a particular idea or intention, and repeating it in as many ways as possible, we access so much more than we can imagine.

But that requires tenacity, and a willingness to stay in the discomfort of what repetition can feel like for us. When we associate repeating an idea or intention with being lazy or boring, or lacking imagination, or limiting, we have already closed the door on possibility and the potency of our curiosity—which can be endless if we're willing to see that.

It's through repetition that we strengthen our ability to notice and ascribe meaning. Looking for the subtle shifts, the evolutions that build through pushing things further, trains our sensibilities to know what going deeper feels like and, more importantly, what it has to offer.

In the years when I offer my 30 Day Sketchbook Accountability Challenge, which is based on a course I developed and launched in 2021, I often get asked if participants would be working with the same prompts. In answering this question for the artists considering repeating the challenge, I always speak to the power of repetition in their art practice.

By making work with the same guiding prompt each year, they can notice how their approach to it has changed. Perhaps in prior years a particular prompt felt challenging to work with, but this time they suddenly have access to something that wasn't there before. That is such valuable information about their development as an artist—telling them what facet of their voice is now being expressed that may not have been before.

The repetition illuminates the contrasts—what is different, what has changed, what am I interested in exploring now. Artists can go deeper, and meet aspects of themselves and their expression that were not revealed to them in the past. Repeating showed them more.