“The Practical, Non-extravagant way”
“I worry about people getting hurt, and regular worries. Creatively, the work just flows. When I want to do something, I think of doing it in a practical, non-extravagant way. I split up my time, so I do a lot of different things in a day. It would be fun to spend a few hundred years on each medium, but it’s not going to happen, so I avoid certain difficult mediums, like oil painting. I love the way oil paint smells, I stick to acrylic…
I take so many 5 minute naps it might add up to a regular night’s sleep. I wake up every morning at 7:30 and read the paper and drink chocolate milk, then take my daughter to school. I run errands during the day, and tend to get work done at nighttime, going steadily till three in the morning on different things. I put my paintbrush down, and pick up my guitar ten feet away and try out my new flanger pedal for an hour, then I paint for an hour, and then I make something out of chopsticks and flexi-straws, and then I might write a short story. I don’t find that hard to do, it’s just the way I do it. I notice inspiration when it comes by. I don’t sit at my desk and try to write: rather, I work at something else and then I’ll get an idea for a short story and make a note. That’s how I jump from medium to medium. If you keep pushing paint when you’re tired of it, you lose sensitivity. I can only focus on painting for a few hours, so I’ll stop and work on something quite different. Making art, I try to just gently persist, instead of having freak-outs where I’m like, Oh My God, I’ll never draw again. You are going to draw again, so you might as well relax.
From an interview with Gary Panter. From The Believer, which has posted the complete interview.
