It takes courage to be creative. As an artist I’m a bit of a dreamer, so in creative situations it’s easy for me to believe that I’m about to make the best thing ever and then feel crushed when I judge my finished project as just ordinary. “Practice makes perfect” is a well known prescription to this kind of extreme thinking, but it’s hardly practical advice because we don’t have endless amounts of time to reach perfection.
I grew up diagnosed with various learning disabilities - dyslexia, dyscalculia and attention deficit disorder. These disabilities or cognitive differences, meant that I would do homework for hours and hours each night just to get a B on my next test. It left me feeling broken and that to keep up in life I’d have to discipline myself by putting tons of work into every little thing I do.
In spite of that conditioning, I’ve been working on believing that I am in fact a good and valuable person just as I am, and that there’s no need to beat myself up or to be a super star in order to be a creative person.
For me, there is no creativity without courage and no courage without self love. When I’m making a painting I need to let go of the fact I’m not perfect. I’m a person just like everyone else, no better, no worse and yet still very valuable. Self love highlights that the work I’m doing is good, that working towards a particular vision is difficult and that everything in life is perfectly imperfect. Self love acknowledges the inherit risks of being creative - that others will judge and reject you in some form or another but that that’s ok, it’s my job to love myself.
I think part of self love is to acknowledge the ways we’re courageous and creative in our daily lives.
Here are 10 ways I’m courageous and practicing self-love with my painting:
Putting my art out in to the world
Accepting commissions - facing the fear that the painting I make won’t live up to the client’s expectations
Continuing to make art - and never fully reaching the ideal vision that’s in my mind
Trying new techniques and subject matter
Being consistent - it sometimes takes courage to stick with something and not always chase the next new idea
Selling my art - it can feel audacious to think someone would want your art and it can also feel like a rejection when your works go unsold
Express my feelings and values plainly in my art — it’s very tempting to hide my feelings and values in my art by using complexity, vagueness, and cryptic symbolism
Allowing for imperfection — allowing some of the raw, real mistakes I make to remain as they are, which end up often being he most interesting parts of the painting
Write about my art plainly and simply — writing about my art in a straightforward manner always makes me feel exposed and vulnerable. But if my art is going to matter at all, my descriptions of it should be as honest as I can make them
Acknowledging with compassion when something doesn’t work — understanding a problem is only productive for me if I do it with lots of love, compassion, a sense of curiosity and objectivity
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