a portrait of a year
a new experiment + lessons learned from one year of Kizuna
The Aligning with Change and Read Like A Writer programs are now open! Spots are starting to fill and early bird pricing will only be available for a limited time.
Practice, Practice, Practice
My main priority this summer is creative experimentation. With that in mind, I’m starting something new - a personal challenge - that honestly makes me a bit nervous.
But I’d like to test it out.
Discipline is critical in the life of an artist. During my years as a concert pianist, I practiced 6-10 hours every day.
During my years as an author, I wrote every single day without fail even if a great deal of the words ended up being pure shit and tossed out during revisions.
Execution through consistent discipline is absolutely necessary for growth and to make it as a professional. You need to hit deadlines and concert / performance dates. That’s the very definition of being pro.
But discipline requires practice. Once we fall out of the habit of doing it, we need to build it back up again.
I’ve fallen out of the practice of writing daily…and I’d like to build it back up again.
I’ve created a new section of my newsletter called “Sketches”. The purpose behind this experiment is to get back into the habit of noting thoughts, musings, reflections, and ideas on a daily (or near daily) basis.
Part of the reason is to rebuild my writing muscles. Part of it is also personal.
note: Shoutout to my friends Matt Ziegler and Justin Castelli who both have wonderful daily emails that inspired this experiment!
I find the idea of having a steady, consistent record of my thoughts (a journal of sorts) to be a fascinating way of keeping track of my own continuing evolution as an artist and a human being.
These will be very very short (and very honest) vignettes - sometimes only a few sentences long - of what’s on my mind that day with no limitations around the topic.
Besides going out via email, each Sketch will be posted on my publication under that particular section.
Given my current workload, committing to DAILY writings might be too difficult right off the bat.
Much like a runner training for a marathon, I’ll start with small steps and gradually build strength.
Here are my parameters:
Aim for 3-4 brief Sketches per week
Try it out for the summer (until the end of August) and see whether I’d like to continue, stop, or scale up.
None of you will receive these emails unless you subscribe to them. I only want those who would be interested in these musings to receive them.
If you’d like to receive them and you have a Substack account, log in, then:
Go to Settings
Scroll down to the Subscriptions section
Select “Kizuna”
Turn on subscription for “Sketches”
If you don’t have a Substack account (or don’t want to deal with all that stuff) and want to subscribe to Sketches, just hit reply on this email and I’ll get you set up!
Would you like to join me? I encourage anyone who’d like to participate in this writing challenge to get involved!
Paid subscribers can post in the comments or you can hit reply on this email and let me know:
What consistent, short-form writing you’ll be doing (mini-diary entries? cooking recipes? short flash fiction? show / episode breakdowns or reviews? daily meditations? whatever the hell you want? the possibilities are limitless!)
Where you’ll be posting (website, newsletter, Substack, Medium, etc)
How many times a week you’d like to post
I’d love to support and follow along! First Sketches email will go out tomorrow (Friday!) 💫
Lessons from One Year of Kizuna
I performed my first work by Claude Debussy at eight years old (Images Book I).
It was my first experience with the artistic style of Impressionism and it utterly enchanted me.
Understanding how I could “paint” an image or scene through sound - how I could illustrate the play and changing of light through colors reverberating from the piano - became an obsession.
I submerged myself in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarme. I devoured books on Monet, Degas, Renoir, and Cassat, immersing myself in their visual language.
At age 17, I finally had an opportunity to view Monet’s Water Lilies in person at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.
I stood as close to the painting as I could (a steely-eyed museum guard watched me closely) and studied the flurry of strokes across the canvas.
Up close, the perspective was marvelously exquisite and different.
Water was of course not depicted through a one-dimensional, simplistic blue. Instead, it was a furious mishmash of browns, purples, greens, yellows, reds, and even black.
This was where Monet stood as he created the work, his brush gliding across the blank canvas countless times.
But I was struck by a nearly existential question.
The only way to truly “see” the entire work was by stepping a few feet away from the canvas to take it in as a whole.
How did Monet do this?
How did he maintain the proximity to the canvas necessary to create yet ultimately realized a vision that could not be seen from that perspective?
This absolutely fascinated me…and I’m going to come back to this.
But first, I want to dive into a few of the lessons I’ve learned over the past year.
If there’s one word I would use to describe my first year of Kizuna, it’s growth.
Change defined every facet of this year and it would be a near impossible task for me to share everything I experienced and learned.
Instead, I’ve distilled it down to eight takeaways: