“The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.”
James Joyces, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I’d go as far as saying that what the beautiful is, is none of your business.
Every single artist I know has expressed some version of:
“My work is not good enough”. Replace “good” with whatever adjective you want (exciting, interesting, different, original, etc),
Sounds familiar?
Your job is to create, not judge your creations. Your job is to explore the depth of your creativity, excavate your inner voice and make a diamond out of whatever rough is lying there.
Yes you have impeccable taste. I don’t doubt that for a second. The problem is that with impeccable taste comes great responsibility.
Allow me to explain.
The middle of any creative project is admittedly the hardest part. Right? It is the liminal space the hero finds himself in along his hero’s journey. The bit that really sucks. After a lot of initial excitement and hard work, everything you’ve done so far seems shit, pointless and devoid of interest all of a sudden.
That’s what I call the graveyard of creative ideas.
I should know, I have a hard drive full of them.
Half-finished, hardly started or almost completed pieces of work that will never see the light of day.
And why? Because I judged them too quickly. Or rather, I should say we judged them too quickly: Me, my impeccable taste and that snarky perfectionism.
Here’s a little story from “Art & Fear” by David Bayles and Ted Orland, that will illustrate my point:
“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. (…)
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”
Here’s another way of putting it:
“Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.”
Julia Cameron
Why do we keep doing this to ourselves as artists?
Well, my guess is because once we finish our piece of work, we will see the gaps between what we intended to do and what we actually created. Hello disappointment, self-judgment etc.
Also, finishing work means getting to the next stage in the creative process: sharing the damn thing, and that’s terrifying.
Our work at that point is done and how others receive our work is totally out of our control.
(does this idea make you cringe too?)
So it makes perfect sense that we delay, sometimes indefinitely, the moment of declaring “this is good enough”.
What a powerful phrase though, “good enough”.
So today I’d like to invite you to be brave enough to give perfectionism the middle finger and allow your creations to come to a natural end.
And then, let. it. go. It may be beautiful, it may not. It’s none of your business.
Remember, your job is to create the beautiful. Not decide what is.
One thing is certain. If you don’t produce a lot of average work and shitty first attempts, if you don’t try new things, learn, mess up and try again, it’s unlikely your work will be very interesting in the end.
And you and I both know this would be a huge waste of your talent.
Create. Share. Repeat.
You’ve got this.
Much love, and creativity, always.
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