One thing I’ve learned about my own artistic process is that I can force myself to finish work, or I can experiment, but I can’t do both at once. If I force myself to finish something in a short amount of time, I can do it, but only by leaning on the skills and habits I’ve already developed and not straying too far our of my comfort zone.

But experiments? Those get finished on their own time, because my brain needs time and space to figure out how to stretch itself. You can’t complete an experiment using only approaches you’re already familiar with. Whenever I work on something that’s more of an experiment it needs quite a bit of time to breathe. It’s hard to make a plan for finishing something that doesn’t know what it’s trying to be yet.

Today I learned something really cool, which is that while English is a stress-timed language, where each word has a stressed syllable, French is syllable-timed and has almost no stress at all within words. This explains why French words tend to sound weird to me when said in English – because in English, there’s a need to assign a stress. In French, it might be cli-ché, but in English, it’s cli-CHÉ.