The ability to recognize your current mood, accept it and plan for it rationally can really help with the quality of work.
I only spent an hour painting today. I recognized about a half hour into painting that my mind was wondering. I couldn’t give the painting the focus it deserves. So I accepted it and decided to stop after 1 hour.
I believe that my representational art cannot be achieved well without focus and motivation. If I’m not able to focus or I really don’t feel like it, I recognize it, accept it, and cut my session short. This is not an excuse to be lazy, it’s an acceptance of the flow and ebb of our normal day to day emotional state.
I’ll suggest that if you’re feeling the same, analyze the whole of your day or week and maybe you can come up with some obvious “cause and effect”. Lack of sleep, stress at work, not eating right, not enough exercise can effect your emotional state, focus and everything. Sometimes it is a very tricky balance.
Recognize, analyze, then make a change.
“Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, wich takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.” -Arnold J. Toynbee
