On Instant Gratification

"Arctic Hare." John James Audubon. c. 1841
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art Open access Program

Hello friends,

I want to share with you a new guiding principle I have stumbled upon for creating balance in my creative life.  That principle is to make sure that I have a healthy sampling of both long-term and instant gratification projects going on.  I think this is what I was missing up until now.

I'm one of those people who has to work on some type of creative or artistic project every day to feel sane.  In the past I've relied a lot on longer term creative projects that I worked on a little bit every day.  Long knitted lace shawls, for instance, where I'd knit a few inches each night for weeks or even months.  A layered acrylic painting that requires lots of steps, with time to dry inbetween, to get the texture I want.  Handmade perfumes that required lots of trial and error and letting scent sit for long periods of time to see how they age.

But then a few months ago, when I discovered dying with indigo, something changed.  This new skill let me watch a project go from absolutely nothing to completely finished in only a few hours.  At the time I didn't quite identify it as instant gratification; I just knew that there was something really rewarding about it and that I wanted to keep dying scarf after scarf after scarf to see how they'd each turn out.

Fast forward to this past weekend.  I'm signed up to sell a bunch of my handmade items at a Mother's Day Pop-up Market in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington D.C. on May 13 (stop by and say hi if you live in the area!)  Knowing this, I decided it would be a good idea to use some blank cards I had laying around anyway to make mother's day cards.  Needing a quick and dirty way to produce some cards fast, so that I wouldn't take too much time away from building up my stock of my more standard merchandise for the show, I turned to the block printing skills I learned at a workshop I took several months back.  I sat down, carved out a "Mom" print in about an hour, and set forth quickly block printing about 20 cards. The printing process itself was super speedy, taking maybe 15 minutes.

Something about that process was super satisfying.  I was having so much fun, in fact, that I found other experimental blocks I had carved out after my class but never worked with and started just printing on printer paper, for fun, to see how they turned out.  I ended up producing tons of prints!  I won't picture them here because they are political in nature and contain some colorful language about a particularly controversial figure who is in power at the moment and whom I shall not name.  The point is, unlike the meditative and calm feeling of slowly contributing little by little to my knitted projects, it was exciting.  It was exciting to be able to quickly produce several different finished items in a short period of time.

As it happens I showed my prints to a few friends and it seemed like everybody wanted one, so being able to just hand them over to anyone who wanted one because they were so fast and easy to make, and have everyone enjoy them certainly added to the satisfaction.  Compare to a beautiful knitted piece that takes me 3 months to make and can only go to one friend.

Same thing with the indigo scarves.  Once you have your dye vat prepped, you can dunk many different scarves either simultaneously or one after the other, making finished pieces in great big batches.  Block printing evoked the experience of doing my first indigo dyes: wanting to do more and more and getting excited to see how each one turned out.

So then I realized, that's what made both these experiences different: instant gratification.

Even compared to jewelry-making, which might only require an hour or two to do a completed project if it's small and simple, these were fast and addictive.  Jewelry is methodical.  You're slowly building the piece at a constant rate.  With printmaking and dying, boom, there's one.  Boom, another. And a third, a fourth.  You get to instantly enjoy pieces and compare them to one another, and experiment quickly and with ease.  It's a totally different pace.

And so I've realized that I need to incorporate more instant-gratification arts into my repertoire on a more regular basis.  I love knitting and painting and jewelry-making, and I consider them skills I have finely honed over time.  The pieces I create are beautiful and intricate, and the amount of time and meticulous effort that goes into them is evident and a large part of what makes them beautiful.  But the flip side is that the time it takes to make a single project can make them seem daunting, lead to burnout and even feel more like a chore than a hobby.  They're satisfying, but not necessarily fun.

On occasion I think it's worth it to spend a day, or even just a few hours, enjoying the feeling of having produced lots of new pieces in a short period of time.

How about you, readers?  Do you find that you tend to gravitate more toward longer-term or instant-gratification projects or a balance of both?  Do you find that the speed and frequency at which you're able to produced finished items has an impact on your overall creative satisfaction one way or the other or is it more about the journey for you?  What are your favorite types of hobby for a fast creative fix or last minute gift?  Discuss in the comments.

Emily