Its easy to be an amateur. Get inspired, do a painting and get some kind words from your family and friends. Then you can sit back until the muse lights up again.

But is that what you want?

If you truly want to make art the center and sustainer of your life, then it has to be more.  When you are tired from your day job, your family, your commitments and a thousand other tiny tears in your time, everything outside will start calling to you.

Just tonight, just this once, you deserve it, relax

The distractions are plentiful and eager for your time.

Its that moment when you need to know this. You need to hold it in you as a truth so pure you would feed it to a newborn.

Nothing can be as fun, as satisfying, or as fulfilling to the depths of your heart as working on your art.

It has to be at the center of your mind all the time, the thing that pulls hardest at you when everything else is pulling too. It has to be the most fun you could be having at any moment.

Of course you need balance and moderation and attention to being human.  You know this and it isn’t why I am posting today.

Today it is all about the making. If you are serious about improving, about becoming the creator that you dream of being, than it will only happen in the tense tight hours of the everyday. Practice upon practice. Production upon production. There is a struggle to artmaking – wrestling an idea into form is not the slick simplicity of pressing print. Its the daily act of childbirth writ through your medium.

So much happens in the actual act of making. It builds on what you have done, and starts to suggest things back to you. Like any relationship if you throw yourself into it and commit, then despite whatever struggles come it will reward you.

Put in the time, make it all happen, and you will get there. Its just hours away.