A New Year Art Challenge

Something to look forward to: getting your favourite theme up on the wall

I don’t know how far you can mentally prepare for the bleakness of January in England, but I’m making a plan while I’m full of Christmassy optimism.

I will create Vorfreude. It’s the German word for the anticipatory feeling when something nice is ahead (it basically means ‘pre-joy’).

To conjure some January pre-joy, I’m planning a personal weekly art project (and you can borrow the idea!).

In designing a challenge for myself, I want to encourage creative focus at a bleak time — be it the month of the year or the state of the world¹ — so I’m gonna avoid the daily prompts of most art challenges.

If I work on a project of just four related paintings, I think I’ll have a better chance of getting lost in creative flow than if I’m doing quick sketches for two dozen prompts.

What’s been inspiring you this year? I keep coming back to the theme of jumbled, skewed buildings (‘Derelicte’). I’ve been doing sketches but no ‘finished’ art. This January I will put my favourite theme on canvas, with a different ‘colour prompt’ starting each Sunday.

Each painting will have a different predominant colour:

• Sunday 5 Orange

• Sunday 12 Blue

• Sunday 19 Pink

• Sunday 26 Green

When I say working on canvas, I mean any material as long as it’s not hidden in a sketchbook: it must be something you could put on the wall to show people! The goal is to feel like an artist making artworks.

The paintings don’t all have to be completed, just brought to the point where your idea is recognisable.

Each week will have an easy beginning: slap on the main colour. I’m not going to worry about the compositions in advance; I have lots of reference photos to choose from and I hope to just go with the flow.

I designed this challenge for myself, but you can make it all about you — go with your own favourite theme and just get cracking². I chose colours that appeal to me; you can stick with them or pick whatever you like — I would advise choosing them in advance to make the project simpler.

Let’s follow our own interests and find creative flow this winter.

1. In German: Weltschmerz, literally world-pain, a feeling of world-weariness. The Germans have a word for everything! (Except when they don’t — there’s no direct translation for ‘pun’, smh).

2. Is this too British a phrase? Get on with it, get the ball rolling, roll up your sleeves etc etc