Done with india ink. I don't know how creative I got, but this exercise did help me see the jar more completely and it did help me break through a nugget of creative resistance. So, yay!
“I don’t want to have a huge library of techniques. When you’re painting very directly out in the landscape, there are enough things that go wrong—weather, you get hungry, ...the light moves on you. ...Enjoy the simplicity of a few techniques.”
If curiosity and willingness to try new things opens the door to creativity, so, too, can simplicity.
In sketching it may be going out with only a pen and a sketchbook. Or limiting my palette to just three colors. Or trying to figure out how to capture my world using only a bottle of sepia ink and a dip pen.
I’m reminded of Jimmy Lee Sudduth, an Alabama folk artist who was too poor, in the beginning, to buy art supplies. But he had to make art. So he painted with the mud he found in his back yard. (He told me once he had seven different colors of mud in his backyard Is that stretching the notion of simplicity?)
The simplicity of gleaning, of limiting my choices, requires a much bigger leap of faith and a deeper willingness to suspend judgment and get through the resistance.
It’s a good exercise for creative muscles, though. One I admit, I have to try more often.