Painting sidchas: A Painting A Day

January 4, 2019 by Joshua
in Art, SIDCHAs

I found some great examples of success through sidchas you’ll enjoy seeing. Through Seth Godin, who posts to his blog daily, I learned of Abbey Ryan, who paints a painting a day. I hope she doesn’t mind my showing her ten most recent paintings, to show their beauty and so people don’t confuse a painting a day with skimping.

According to Wikipedia,

A recognized leader in the “Painting-A-Day” movement, Ryan’s work has been featured and reviewed in dozens of print and web publications, including Seth Godin’s Linchpin, O, The Oprah Magazine, as part of the Women Who Make Beautiful Things section, Boing Boing, Good Day Philadelphia on WTXF, Yale Radio’s The Art World Demystified, WYBC, Brainard Carey’s Making It In the Art World, New Markets for Artists, and American Art Collector magazine. Ryan was named #5 on the list of “49 Creative Geniuses Who Use Blogging to Promote Their Art” by BoostBlogTraffic.com. Ryan’s work is held in over 1200 public and private collections all over the world.

A local paper’s piece, Celebrated Hill artist’s work in over 900 collections, said she

may just be one of the most celebrated artists in the Delaware Valley, if not the entire country. Ryan, 36, is ranked fifth on the list of 49 Creative Geniuses by Boost Blog Traffic. Her paintings are in more than 900 private, public and museum collections around the world, including the John F. Peto Museum in New Jersey, Pratt Institute in Ithaca, N.Y., Mason Murer Fine Art in Atlanta and Blutenweiss Gallery in Berlin.

She posts something like daily at her picture blog, going back to her start in September 2007. You can read more about her in her essay, Becoming a Daily Painter, which I recommend because I consider sidchas one of the most effective routes to enduring success by nearly any standard and few people have them.

For reference, here are her six first paintings, each a day apart. She wasn’t starting from nowhere, but the sidcha is developing her.

Her about section says:

Inspired by the “A Painting a Day” movement, I started making daily paintings for my blog on 9/23/07.

Ten years later, my blog has had over a million visitors from over 100 countries. My paintings have been featured in O, The Oprah Magazine‘s “Live Your Best Life—Women Who Make Beautiful Things,” Seth Godin’s bestseller, Linchpin: Are You Indispensible?, and FOX’s Good Day Philadelphia, among many others. I was recently named #5 on the list of 49 Creative Geniuses by Boost Blog Traffic.

More importantly, painting has become my meditative time and the best part of my day. Attempting to paint every day speaks to my interest in ritual, practice, classical still life and trompe l’oeil painting. In sharing my work on my blog, I explore the nuances and complexities of ever-changing internet globalization. My paintings are usually sold by eBay auctions, and are in over eight hundred private and public collections around the globe.

The Painting a Day movement

She refers to her inspiration, Duane Keiser, who started the A Painting A Day page and the movement, if that’s the right word. So this is a significant sidcha. Duane wrote

If mindfulness can be defined as the simple act of noticing things, then “A Painting a Day” is a kind of meditation. For me, these paintings are about the pleasure of seeing; of being cognizant of the world around me and pushing to find an alchemy between the paint, my subject and the moment. I view each piece as being part of a single, ongoing work.

Here are some of his recent works:

Here are his earliest.

Speaking of Seth and sidchas, beyond practicing his and writing about Abbey’s, he writes about others’. Quoting him (bold in the original):

More than 400 published books. How did [Isaac] Asimov possibly pull this off?

Asimov woke up every morning, sat in front of his manual typewriter, and he typed.

That was his job, to type.

The stories were the bonus that came along for the ride.

He typed when he wasn’t inspired. The typing turned into writing and he became inspired.

We don’t write because we feel like it.

We feel like it because we write.

You don’t need more good ideas. You need more bad ideas.

Sidchas are your route to bad ideas, which are your route to good ideas, which are your route to great ideas and success.

What’s your sidcha?

When I see results like this, I can’t help but think, how does everyone not have a sidcha?

I hope you have one. Not just daily habits like brushing your teeth or reading the paper. A self-imposed daily challenging healthy activity is the bedrock on which you can build a successful life, by whatever you consider success. I recommend reading up on them and creating one.

It doesn’t have to take much time, money, or any other resource. On the contrary, it creates them. I’d love to hear yours.

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