Drawing this columbine flower required a few supplies, including paper, colored pencils, and a little bit of patience (not pictured).
As an artist, I spend a lot of time putting pencil marks and brush strokes onto paper and canvas as I create artworks. Hours, days, weeks, and months easily roll by. So much work needs to take place between drawing an initial sketch and calling an artwork “finished.” The stopping point is often undefined and located at the end of a very distant horizon.
A single square inch of one of my photorealistic pieces can spend a considerable amount of time under my dedicated focus. When I work in colored pencil, for instance, I typically work on one small section such as a leaf or a petal until it is finished before moving on to the next section. Slowly but surely, pencil pigment is applied to paper and the image forms.
One important ingredient needed for my art-making process is not a supply that can be bought. It is patience. And this is not an ingredient I find myself regularly running out of. Despite the snail’s pace and my looking forward to seeing the finished product, I find that my patience is actually not tested too much while I work on a project. While, yes, sometimes tedious, the art-making process is, without a doubt, predominantly one of enjoyment.
I suppose the trick to patience is to enjoy the process of whatever it is one is doing or at least trust that the end result of an endeavor will be rewarding. Time would then be allowed to slip into the back of the mind while attention to the project at hand would be at the forefront.
Whenever I think about patience, I cannot help but also think about natural history and geological occurrences. Famous natural wonders, from the Great Lakes of North America to Mount Everest of Asia, are the results of transformations that took place over the course of impressive lengths of time. Earth’s inner and external workings, including erosion, weather, plate tectonics, and the like, have all made Earth into the planet we know it to be today and took whatever length of time they needed to do so.
Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It and other natural wonders found throughout the earth were formed over the course of significant stretches of time.
By no means am I saying my art is as magnificent as these natural wonders (or that I have the patience that can last the amount of time it took to make them), but these examples show the result of patience on a large scale. At the very least, they should provide encouragement. To personify them, their patience coupled with persistence has created true works of art.
Most artists make art because they like making art, and that is the case for me. Because a finished piece will not pop up at the snap of my fingers, I am treated to the slow progress of its formation. While there might be deadlines or other looming pressures and frustrations that gnaw at my patience to one degree or another, I do not belittle the necessity of patience. It is an essential component to a finished product with which I am ultimately happy to sign and frame.