The movement of the medium!

This is my view...hope it inspires someone out there Most, if not all of us create a goal in order to achieve...painting/art is a constant journey of achievement, acceptance, and personal expression..that's why we do it! Some of us (including me) seek a period of formal training, and strive to learn from our endeavours. However, im my case, I have found that after all the formal training, from which I gained the basic understandings of medium, colour, palette, surfaces, history, the Masters etc, I didn't really expand my abilities until I embarked on a self-teaching mission..in other words, experimenting with what I call the movement of the medium! What do I mean? ok..well, this is what I do to push my own limitations in a self-teaching mode. Try it.....if nothing else, it opens up opportunities that otherwise you might never experience! I take a blank canvas/board/paper or whatever, and set it up alongside my working easel ( when working with oils, in my case). Now, instead of cleaning off my brushes after each application to the artwork on the palette or rag, I actually remove the paint from the brush onto this blank surface, and continue this practice during the painting session. At the end of the painting, and having removed it from the easel, I then place the "cleaning canvas"onto the easel, and survey it for a while. What I am faced with is a collation of wet colour in no particular arrangement, just a mass of colourmix!....now, having viewed it for a while, I then pick up a brush or palette knife, and begin to move the medium around, attempting to create something from nothing! This practice will allow you to use your imagination, and to apply skills in order to create a picture from your mind's eye, so to speak. As you play with the medium in this way, often something will begin to occur, and once this happens, you will be inspired to add or remove the medium, in order to establish some sort of order to it....in my case, the production of a fictitious landscape, perhaps! What this practice does, it allow you to express your own inpressions, and apply a plethera of techniques. So, your goal, such as it is, is to make something from what is presented in the first place as just a collection of medium, in no particular order. A great excercise! I have a friend who paints abstract, and he uses this method. Often his "cleaning canvas" produces a better painting than what was on the easel! Try it, if for no other reason, it tests your ideas of composition!