I didn’t make this chart, but it descries pretty accurately what I feel like I experience most of the time when it comes to my art. When I stumbled across it one day, I immediately said to myself, “Oh my. There’s someone else?!”

I’m always a little pleased to figure out that other people may experience the same levels of frustration, the same coming and goings of inspiration and motivation, and the same tendency to end up surfing the internet for hours looking for one or the other when the intention was to be creating something.

It’s interesting to me that I seem to do my best work at the rare moments that I am both inspired and motivated. The rest of the time I find myself with one and not the other. Disaster – in the form of naps and stumble upon – usually ensues.

I’m grateful for those rare moments when things seem to align and the creative process comes easy and feels natural. But I am also grateful for the times that I have to push through seemingly countless obstacles just to finish a painting or force myself to sketch – because it’s those times, when it doesn’t come easy and it feels difficult and I do it anyway, that demonstrate to me how much I really love creating and how much I thrive off of the process (all of its parts!) and make me appreciate the easy times even more.