Keeping Dreams Real: Expert Advice for Mastering Art and Living Well

Susan Paterson meticulously creates her still-life paintings, sometimes spending 35 to 50 hours on the drawing alone. She's pictured here in her studio painting "Eggs With Lace Tablecloth." Oil on panel; 12 inches by 18 inches. Susan Paterson

In January, many of us plan our year ahead. Each year, I try to make time for two big creative projects, each dictated by the seasons: In spring and summer my fruit and vegetable garden demands my attention, and then in autumn and winter, I focus my time on learning an art or craft. This year it’s dressmaking.

In my mind’s eye, I’ve already created a peaceful garden oasis abuzz with bees, birds, and butterflies, full of juicy fruit and vibrant vegetables. My cupboard is full. There’s no need to go grocery shopping anymore. I’ve similar dressmaking dreams. In my head, I’ve made a perfectly tailored summer dress from raw silk, which swishes in the summer breeze as I skip to my garden heaven.

In reality, my summer dress is still a pile of blue raw silk, tucked away in the cupboard next to my sewing machine, and last year’s harvest gave me enough for an odd garnish: Some raspberries and a few bunches of salad leaves, to name a couple.

This year, I was focusing on the steps that I need to take to get closer to my creative hopes and dreams, when it dawned on me that the fine artists and craftspeople that I’ve interviewed for The Epoch Times have already blessed me with heaps of advice and guidance about how they became experts in their fields. I’m not aiming for their level of mastery, but when I looked back at a few of their nuggets of advice, I realized that their advice didn’t always apply just to art; some were universal values for living well.

Pick a Profession and Master It

In the 1980s, self-taught silversmith Scott Hardy made spurs and horse jewelry until he met two master silversmiths. Over a drink, they shared their work and advice. Each concentrated on one area of Western craft. One of them said to Hardy: “Pick a profession and become the best you can be at it. You owe that to the materials.”

Master silversmith Scott Hardy in his workshop. Years ago, a master silversmith once advised Hardy to gain proficiency in one profession and to honor the materials. Leslie Hardy

From that day on, Hardy focused on gold- and silversmithing. He made it his mission to read and learn all he could about the methods and materials of his trades.

Silversmith Scott Hardy works on a silver belt buckle. Leslie Hardy

Hardy likens learning to climbing one part of a mountain and then reaching a lush meadow, where one can choose to rest after conquering a skill or choose to keep improving one’s skills to reach higher levels. Hardy always chooses to climb. Now, with over 41 years of working at perfecting his trade, he takes smaller steps, but they’re no less significant.

Start Small to Become Great

Saddler Cary Schwarz advises any aspiring craftsperson to start small. Some of his students set their expectations high due to what they’ve seen on YouTube video tutorials and social media channels that show craftspeople making exquisitely crafted objects. But these omit the hundreds of hours of practice that each skilled craftsperson has undergone to be proficient.

Saddler Cary Schwarz encourages aspiring craftspeople to start small, become acquainted with the materials first, and then learn the processes and techniques step by step. Courtesy of Cary Schwarz

Students want to start their saddle-making journey at second or third base, when what they need to do is to take a process-oriented approach and reach first base first, he said. He tells his students to first become acquainted with the leather and understand how it feels to work with it.

Saddler Cary Schwarz inspects one of his oak leather saddles in his workshop. Courtesy of Cary Schwarz

Know Your Materials Well

George O’Hanlon encourages professional painters to make their own paint, or at least know how to. As the director of Natural Pigments, a U.S. company that manufactures rare and hard-to-find fine arts materials, O'Hanlon says that a lot of artists today don’t understand paint; they rely on commercial paint from a tube.

O’Hanlon sees this as a major disadvantage for them. He likens those artists to chefs picking up a couple of jars of sauce and some ingredients at the supermarket to make a meal. They’re not cooking a meal; they’re assembling it. “Imagine a chef not knowing how to prepare a sauce from scratch, or how to prepare a dish from the basic ingredients,” he said.

Artists today aren’t experimenting in paint making, as they did in the past, because they haven’t learned how to make paint at college, and they can’t readily access the paint-making materials.

O’Hanlon promotes using the simplest of paint formulas, and then artists can see how elements interact with each other. When they know each element in their paint—because they’ve made it themselves—they have more control over the painting process.

Be Disciplined and Put in the Hours

Still-life painter Susan Paterson believes that budding artists are often unaware of the amount of work and discipline it takes to produce such detailed art as hers. “People think you have to be inspired to go up there to your studio and paint, but I do treat it like a job,” she said. For Paterson, that means working six to seven hours a day, Monday through Friday.

Susan Paterson meticulously creates her still-life paintings, sometimes spending 35 to 50 hours on the drawing alone. She's pictured here in her studio painting "Eggs With Lace Tablecloth." Oil on panel; 12 inches by 18 inches. Susan Paterson

Sometimes a painting can take three to four months to complete, so she normally works on two or three paintings at a time while the oil paint slowly dries. Sometimes she’s even had to polish a silver piece in her arrangement, and more often has had to dust the pieces as the dust settles on them over time.

"Silver and Lace With Eggs," 2022, by Susan Paterson. Oil on panel; 38 inches by 18 inches. Paterson won an ARC Purchase Award with this painting, and also second place in the still-life category of the 16th Art Renewal Center (ARC) Salon. Hugo Ford/Image House

She can spend 35 to 50 hours on the drawing alone to get every aspect of the composition accurate before her paintbrush connects to paint and panel. Some of Paterson’s larger paintings can take 200 hours to create.

Take Time to Reflect and See Your Progress

Mixed media artist Susannah Weiland loves how embroidering by hand sets its own pace. There’s no way of doing it fast. She embroiders in stages, laboring long and hard at each motif.

Mixed media artist Susannah Weiland hand embroiders one of her pencil drawings. Weiland often photographs her work at the start and end of each day to see her progress. Courtesy of Susannah Weiland

She enjoys the slow, intensive process but needs sanity breaks to stop, reflect, and rest her eyes. “It’s good to take a break and then come back to it, and then you notice things that you want to change or you want to add in,” she said.

"July Sky," 2022, by Susannah Weiland. Hand embroidery into leather; 10 5/8 inches by 11 1/4 inches. Courtesy of Susannah Weiland

Weiland often photographs her work at the beginning and end of her day since, working at a slow pace and on such a small scale, she can easily lose sight of her progress.

Follow in the Footsteps of Those You Admire, but Pave Your Own Path

Representational painter Kristen Yann’s college education fell far short of her hope to learn traditional painting techniques. “It was just very poor training as far as technique goes, and a heavy emphasis on how to think,” she said.

The one golden nugget of advice that she got from college was to look at the websites and résumés of artists whom she admired and see where they trained. One of Yann’s favorite living artists, Alex J. Venezia, had also been to a university but ended up training at East Oaks Studio in Raleigh, North Carolina.

East Oaks Studio, she explained, is not an instructional program. It’s a community of artists who paint together, share information, and critique each other’s work.

Yann won an East Oaks Studio scholarship. She spent long periods of time watching East Oaks Studio co-founder Louis Carr and resident artist Venezia paint. “I learned from observation, and that’s a really wonderful thing because you don’t get a lot of this ‘head’ knowledge blocking your intuition” when you’re painting, she said.

She believes that observing artists at work far exceeds reading about techniques because you can see art in practice. You see how the artists put their brushes to the palette, how much paint they pick up on their brushes, how they mix their paints, and even how they hold their brushes.

Draw and Paint Directly From Nature, Not Photographs

For luminist painter Joseph McGurl, having a direct connection with nature is essential when he paints in the luminist style. It’s one of the reasons he creates plein air paintings, and why he never uses photographs in his artistic process. Luminism is all about light and spirituality, he explained, and a photograph has neither of those qualities. “A photograph has no light. If you turn off the light bulb that’s shining on it, there’s no light emanating from that photograph.”

He added that because photographs contain no light, painting from a photograph means that an artist is not painting light but is painting colors, matching one color to another. For McGurl, painting out in the field is essential for him to be able to interpret the light and sensations necessary for his paintings.

McGurl uses his plein air paintings as investigative tools, as his peers did centuries ago, to deepen his understanding of nature.

Always Remember Your Why

Icon carver Jonathan Pageau first started carving in his spare time because it was something he loved doing. When his bishop saw him carving, he asked Pageau to make him a panagia, the pendant featuring the Virgin Mary with the Christ child that Eastern Orthodox bishops wear when giving the Divine Liturgy.

Pageau had never made a miniature before, so he contacted a Serbian carver who guided him through the process, which took several days. Pageau laughed when he said, “He was ruthless with me. It was wonderful.”

Finally, when he felt he’d done his best, he gave the pendant to his bishop after the liturgy. He’d become so lost in the process of perfecting the carving that he’d momentarily lost track of its significance. But his bishop’s reaction woke him up. As his bishop unwrapped the pendant he made a gesture of reverence, crossing himself and bowing slightly. Pageau was taken aback. “My bishop wasn’t seeing my artwork at that moment. … He was seeing the Virgin.” he said.

It was all Pageau had hoped for. He realized that his bishop would wear the object he’d made and that it would follow the bishop through his spiritual life, including his church services.