My best teacher lives in a cardboard box.

He told me to write this essay.

Every Sunday morning, I sit down in front of a camera and talk to myself.

Officially, it’s a behind-the-scenes video for the members of our YouTube channel. But really it’s just me — in the studio, or out in the garden — going back over the week and thinking out loud about everything I’ve been making: videos, essays, drawings, paintings, ideas. What I’m excited about, what I’ve struggled with, what I’ve figured out, what’s going on in my life that’s feeding the work, and what I want to try next.

That video isn’t the only journal I keep. Every night, when I climb into bed, I pull out my phone and write down what I did that day, what I felt, and what I made, with a couple of photos to go along with it. An ongoing record of a life spent making things.

And then there’s the third thing, which I do every few months. I visit my archives.

I have shelves of sketchbooks and boxes of drawings and stacks of old writing that go all the way back to my childhood. They’re in my studio and out in the garage, on hard drives and up in the cloud, and my phone holds scans of just about every drawing I’ve made in the past quarter century.

Every so often, I go wading through all of it. I pull out old essays and reread the comments people left. I flip through the books I’ve written. I run a finger down the long list of ideas I still haven’t gotten to. I even dig through the bins of art supplies and rescue some good tool that slid to the back and got forgotten.

Now, why would a grown man spend a perfectly good afternoon rummaging around in his own back catalog?

Because making art is a solitary business, and I’ve come to accept an inconvenient truth about myself: I’m a worse judge of my work the closer I am to having made it. The psychologists even have a name for it — construal level theory. The further away something gets, in time or in distance, the more calmly and clearly you can see it.

The drawing I finished this morning, I can barely stand to look at. The one from 2014, I can see plain as day.

So my review is where I get to be my own coach. I take the long view. I go looking for the throughlines — the slender threads running between this week’s essay, this week’s drawings, and some half-thought I scribbled down years ago. I look back at the days when the work flowed and ask myself what was going on there, and how I can get back to it. And I find the times it seized up and ask why I chucked it all.

It’s also, frankly, where I got to steal. Not from Hockney or Crumb — from myself. I dig up an idea I once abandoned and see whether there’s any juice left to squeeze out of it. Usually there is. I’ve picked up so many new skills since I quit on it that Earlier Me and Current Me can finally collaborate: he had the idea, I’ve finally got the chops, and between us we get the thing done.

This is why I don’t throw away the work I hate on the day I make it. Right then, I’m the worst possible judge of it — tired, sour, standing much too close. So instead of tossing it, I stuff it in a book or a box and let it marinate. It’s all fodder and fertilizer for the future.

I could hire a coach. I could sign up for a course. And sometimes I do. But the teacher I keep learning the most from is the one who’s been keeping my hours all along — every earlier version of me, filed away on the shelves and up in the cloud and, yes, in a battered cardboard box out in the garage, waiting for me to come find him.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. Speaking of learning from myself: I spent the past two years teaching myself to make vibrant paintings with tempera paint sticks, mostly because I couldn’t find anyone else to teach me. When I sat down to review what I’d learned, I found a whole set of techniques I’d developed — so I organized and codified them into something I could pass on. If you’d like to make some gorgeous technicolor art with me, I’m running a new Tempera Flowers workshop next weekend, Saturday, July 18th. Click here to learn more.

P.P.S. And if you’d like to see those weekly behind-the-scenes videos, click here to find out how.