Art as my Sadhana: What I learnt from drawing everyday for the first month of 2022 (Days 31/365)

10 min readFeb 2, 2022

Here are some pieces of art I did in January 2022 as a part of my “draw everyday” practice. I usually share them here on my Instagram page.

I am an artist. I draw; it’s been one of my most fundamental and intrinsic identities from when I was two years old. I draw on any surface/media possible and am innately curious about art-making methods, techniques, and subjects. I want to say that despite being an artist for almost all of my life, I have been only been more serious about it in the last decade. I feel like I don’t owe my artist identity to doing art commissions, participating in solo or curated art shows, or being featured in the press for different art projects I have done over time. I identify as an artist because I make art and it’s as simple as that. Now, whether I am a good or a bad artist is a wholly different topic altogether, one that I will talk about at a later time.

Why I am drawing every day of 2022

When I was younger, I made art for the sake of the process and the art itself. I drew because it was fun and learning something new excited me. As a kid in post-liberal India (I was born the year of, in 1991) with new media emerging but not yet inundated by social media and its pressures, real-life people—my parents, friends, family, and neighbors were my first fans and critiques. I made art on whims and fancies about anything that grabbed my interest and was largely self-taught, copying drawings from others’ practice books. Time passed, I grew up and with the advent of technology, newer platforms for artists to showcase their art also emerged. Now, in addition to making art, I have to manage the showcasing of my art, adapt to newer methods of sharing my art (think art reels, videos, and so on), and being my own marketing team and publicist. I don’t enjoy it. It’s so easy to get sucked into the rat race of social media ‘followers’ numbers and ‘engagements’ with my art. It’s easy to fall into the trap of comparing ‘likes’ numbers with similar artists such as myself and not feel appreciated for my work. I have to consciously stop caring about these aspects of proving my artistic worth, in a way. This monster of current-day art-making is too prevalent in our lives and it bothers me more than it inspires me.

I am also a perfectionist by nature. I like to leave little room for ‘error’ if I can, from more objectively-perceived elements such as technique, effort, and usage of materials. I also love making detailed art work (I am an architect and truly believe that god lies in the details). All of these attributes combined with the current-day performative nature (I’ll be talking about this in more detail in this article) of creating art pushed me to want to create only the very ‘best’ art…and somewhere along the way, I lost a piece of me that did art for art’s sake. I suddenly had a reputation to keep…and I needed to free myself from my own image/ego to grow.

Art as my Sadhana (spiritual practice)

Sadhana (साधना) is a Sanskrit term used to refer to a daily, ego-transcending spiritual practice where one practices methodical discipline to attain a desired knowledge or goal. Anything can be sadhana as long as it’s practiced with awareness, discipline and intention of growth that doesn’t feed one’s ego. It encourages the practitioner (sadhaka) to use self-discipline to achieve control over ego, connect deeper, and realign with one’s inner self.

One of my art intentions for the year is to go back to the little Hemu that would draw on any surface and without caring about how it looked. I needed to go back to my roots and draw/make art for the sake of it and not be concerned about how it’s received in order to remember why I chose to identify as an artist in the first place…and that’s why I started this daily practice effort.

The idea is that I would draw something…anything…every day of 2022. It can be an elaborate 3-hour painting or a 20-second doodle. The idea is that I draw and simply that alone.

30 days into the project, it’s safe to say that it’s incredibly hard to hold down a full-time job and set aside time at the end of a long day to draw, even if it’s 20 seconds. Nevertheless, I have persisted so far.

Some art experiments (L to R) with a variety of media : Mother in the mornings (watercolors monochrome), Chess X kettles (gouache study sketch), A few of my favourite things (ink, copic markers, and color pencils)

Top three mindset shifts/learnings from one month of making art everyday

I feel like I could talk about countless learnings even from just one month of drawing everyday in terms of technique, style, and art-making. But today, I want to focus on something more fundamental—mindset shifts. As an artist, I find it to be more important to be rooted in one’s own convictions and values (within art and pan-life) to create authentic art. If I wanted to grow, I had to re-calibrate my mindset and intentions that will help me channel more growth, openness, and vulnerability in my processes. Here are the key three mindset shifts I have observed over the last month:

Key Mindset Shifts /learnings

Shift 1: Discipline, not perfection

Some of my biggest strengths and challenges are my perfectionistic tendencies. While it helps me yield fantastic art sometimes, it breaks me down in the process. Sometimes, I second-guess myself if I feel like my art doesn’t reach a certain standard I have found to be “acceptable” for myself. What I realize it has done to me over the years is that I had started taking gingerly, calculated, and precise steps with my art-making process. This automatically reduces the number of art pieces I may create as I spend more time mulling over whether I was creating good art or not. A strong design foundation taught me that in order to get quality, one has to start with quantity.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection. (Mark Twain)

I am fundamentally resetting my mental models —prioritizing the discipline of making art over making art that is perceived to be good for prioritizing discipline will ultimately lead to good art. Recalibrating myself to focus on the process and not the product has helped me in the past month to realign my identity from “I am an artist who creates detailed architectural and unconventional material-based art” and so on, to “I am someone who makes art.” It helps me focus on the most important part of it all: the making itself and the learning through the making while shedding the extra layers of image and ego.

Remember, art-making about the process, not the product.

Here are some pieces that I did on days I had 2 minutes vs. 10 minutes to dedicate to making art. The results vary but the constant action here is the making of art itself.

On days that I had only less than 2 minutes worth of energy to practice my sadhana…I doodled away.

On days that I had less than 10 minutes to draw something, I experimented with continuous contours and gesture sketches

Shift 2: Art as practice, not performance

Like I previously mentioned, the process of making art and selling/marketing it in the current day has become extremely intertwined. While it’s great that the artist of today can diversify what they do, it doesn’t bode well for us to think about anything other than the art/subject itself, when we sit down to make art. With art viewed as “content” in today’s social media age, it’s hard to not be performative with art making.

My use of the phrase “performative art-making” refers to the position of setting up art and the act of art-making as a signal to someone else (social media followers), or a space to gain approval, validation, and interest.

I have many times in the past tried to think of how I will present a piece after it’s done. There are so many resources that now help you analyze what type of art clicks with people or calls for greater engagement and it’s easy to just keep producing more of that to satisfy the “demand.” While I see the importance of the audience’s engagement with art, I think it’s more important that one primarily creates for oneself. I felt the need to break away from the thought of every art piece I make to be a “post” with like counts and comments. So, I opted for a slightly less intense version of it to begin with it.

This looked as simple as sharing my art not as Instagram posts but stories. While it’s still performative in a way, it helped keep me accountable and yet maintain a distance from how people may like/perceive it. It’s a transient story that disappears magically after 24 hours. I am not creating for the person seeing the art, I am first and foremost, creating for myself, as practice, and then, sharing it with the larger world. If someone can get something out of it, that’s great. If not, that’s fine, too.

Making art is a question of watching yourself figure out what to do next. Even if you have an idea, you have to sit down, work, and see what really happens. (Bruce Nauman)

In the process of me releasing myself from performative art-making that might have me do types of art I am already good at or familiar with, I have begun to explore new forms of art I hadn’t previously done (e.g., cyanotype printing, block carving and printing), subjects I don’t otherwise paint, and new techniques.

Newer form of art-making that I have begun to play with—Block printing

Shift 3: Beginner’s mindset, not an expert mindset

I find this to be closely tied with performative art-making. I find that one has the best success with being an expert in the room if they approach things with the lens of a beginner. Make no mistake, I am not discounting the amount of time, effort, money, or discipline one dedicates to be considered and become an expert at something. I respect that knowledge and it can quickly become second nature (for me, that can even simply look like drawing one straight line and drawing another line parallel to it, with no ruler). But I find that one can’t sustain their title as an expert without new learning.

A beginner’s mindset is one of curiosity, willingness to fail and learning from it, asking simpler questions or going back to first principles, and being open/free of any preconceptions. It opens up the world of “what if I do this” instead of “I should do this”—making the leap from being prescriptive to a world of ‘potentials.’

The usefulness of the cup is in its emptiness. (Bruce Lee).

(L) A drawing my nine-year-old niece made for me. (R) I took what she gave me as inspiration and shed preconceived notions of “what makes sense” and went with the flow to create my own version of her drawing.

Oftentimes, when I am making art, I research subjects, do my share of digging and finding inspiration, references, and ideas that can help enhance my technique. Sometimes, I’ve spent more time researching what I might draw than drawing itself in wanting to craft a well-thought out art work with multiple courses of plans. Now, my somewhat-of-an-expert mind gives me that. Sometimes it’s helpful but as a growth mechanism, it’s a huge inhibitor because it pushed me towards performative artmaking. I’ve recently re-adopted the habit of just starting to draw and taking it from there, one step at a time than planning everything. I ended up having more fun, gratitude, (interestingly) intention and abandon, as well out-of-the-box ideas in that process. It makes me more vulnerable as a person and an artist…and vulnerability, while not always my strongest suit, has helped me grow in unencumbered or structured ways. I grow without rails now.