Maria Burtis
“A small daily task if it really be daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules” —Anthony Trollope Since September 12, 2005 I have made one small piece of art every day. I began the process as a way to keep working even though I was overwhelmed with the job of being a full-time, stay-at-home mother of two children. I had no time to go to my studio and paint, but I could find time to draw something small. I bought a sketchbook and began by drawing the minutiae of my daily life-- the goldfish crackers left on the table after a snack, the plastic dinosaur abandoned on the carpet. After a week of drawing every day, I started a weblog and posted the drawings. As time went on, I began “collecting” bits of visual information gathered throughout the course of the day and used that information to make a drawing/painting at night. The work became more abstract and I experimented with different media and surfaces. The act of working every day, and my commitment to that process, has transformed me as an artist and as a person. I have found that even though the sheer amount of work is tremendous over the course of 9+ years, more significantly, making art every day has sustained me, nourished me and changed me. The larger paintings are natural outgrowths of the daily paintings that feed my creative process. I am still a visual magpie, collecting the small bits that I see and feel over the course of a day and feeding that into my work. The larger paintings are meditations on the color of my days—both from the landscape of northern California and from the landscape of my internal emotions.
