Beautiful Struggle

Practice is hard, and that's why it works.

Lately I’ve been spending my Monday afternoons drawing the nude figure. We begin with a series of one-minute poses, with the model shifting into new poses - a twist, a reach, a stretch - every sixty seconds. Then we move to two-minutes, five-minutes, and so on. The longest sessions are still only twenty minutes, and none of the drawings look finished when I’m done. They are studies.

There are days when I’m not in the mood to do this. It requires intense focus, and there isn’t the thrill of completing anything. It’s a Sisyphean struggle of sorts — always going uphill, never at the summit, frequently back at the bottom. Just when you think, “Hey! I’m getting this!” it’s time for the model to move.

When I review the drawings later, I sometimes spot a well-placed line or a curve that feels just right. But more often, I see what's off — awkward proportions, clunky lines, heavy-handed gestures. Honestly, I don’t know what to do with them. Post them to Instagram? Try to sell them? Stow them away in a closet? Making them feels important, but the drawings themselves rarely are.

I’m always looking for a way to tame the chaos of the creative process, to give structure to the struggle. Maybe this is why I’m entranced by 100-day projects, quests people embark on to do one creative act - a dance move, a drawing, a haiku - every day for 100 days. Without fail, there seems to be a breakthrough moment just as the work begins to feel dull and repetitive. Perhaps we need to be a little bored by our work in order to find the spark to innovate.

I’ve certainly seen this happen in my own practice. More than once, I’ve accepted a commission that I wasn’t excited about, because I wanted the money. But then a few days into the work, I start noticing all the aspects of the project that are, well, interesting. I’m not super into it yet, but I’m starting to feel something. I start playing with color relationships and experimenting with brushwork, and something opens up in the process. I’m not painting the subject because it’s inherently appealing to me, but it has become appealing through the act of painting it.

One of my favorite art professors used to say that we don’t make art in response to inspiration. Inspiration comes while you are working. Like happiness or contentment, you can’t force it. You can only create the conditions for it and give it a chance to arrive.

There’s a tendency to layer a certain mysticism onto these arrivals. We talk about muses because we personify what we don’t totally understand — the fact that some days our drudgery is interrupted by something wonderful and unexpected, and some days it is not. Sometimes, the pile of pencil shavings and half-executed sketches shows evidence of a struggle but nothing more.

But I think there’s a less complicated explanation, one that athletes have observed for years: you get better at things by leaning into the difficulty of them. The quick gesture drawings are like intervals on the track, painful repetitions that, over time, build your muscles and develop your cardiovascular system. In art, too, we build strength by doing hard things. There’s no quick path to day 67 of a 100-day project. And you can’t experience the joy or surprise of an unexpected epiphany unless you can deal with the more common experience of just working.

One of the reasons I discourage students from tracing or using AI is that I want them to experience the moment, mid-struggle, when the muse whispers something into their ear or seemingly guides their pencil. I’ve had these moments myself, and I’ve seen them happen for other people, and there’s really nothing like it. I know Sisyphus never rested from his toil, but imagine if he had - sitting there on the summit with his bulging muscles and a sense of contentment, all those repetitions having finally brought him somewhere. Is there anything better to offer someone?