So agonizingly close to being done with a piece that I almost gave up on…
I had this core of a piece that I loved…
This was the biggest, most expressive face that I had sculpted yet. Oh, the possibilities…
and then I was intimidated by it…
and then I was frustrated…
and then I was disappointed…
and then I started to feel like a failure…
and then I wanted to give up working on it entirely…
And then Chet announced an Art Crit at ArtWorks, and I knew what I needed to do. I needed to talk to other artists. I needed to commiserate.
Alone, working by myself, I had fallen into a cycle of nasty, negative self-talk. I was wasting time and resources. I was an amateur. What was I playing at? Of course I was a hack; who was I fooling? Everyone would be better off if I just stopped trying… I couldn’t create something with real meaning or impact. Why had I tried to mimic classical art? Shouldn’t I have known it would be a crashing failure? People were just being nice. They only bought my art so that I wouldn’t feel so bad.
On and on it went in my own personal hamster wheel of self-flagellation. It didn’t help me to do any better, and I was just about to abandon this piece (at least for the time being) when I saw a facebook post saying that there would be Art Crit that Sunday. Friends had tried to be helpful online, but only my son had seen it in person — and his support is unflappable, so I can’t count on him to verbally punch sense back into me. He couldn’t be (slightly) brutal, even if that’s what I needed. The Art Crit crew, on the other hand… They’re perfect!
Mind you, they’ll gauge the individual artist and give more- or less-harsh criticism, depending on what you need and appear to be able to take. They also know how to build a compliment sandwich and frame criticism in a constructive way. Even so, I was afraid that I’d burst into tears this time, given how upset I already was with this piece. Interestingly, absolutely everyone seemed surprised that this was the first time that I had liked my work less and less as it went along. What I really learned at Art Crit was that I had been awfully lucky until now. This experience was actually just a reality check.
You see, never before had I tried a large project that felt like it was working well at first, only to fall apart in the middle, so I hadn’t yet learned to navigate this particular path. I’d gone from bad to good, from bad to yeah-no-this-sucks, and from good to better. This was my first experience of going from good to bad, but their encouragement helped give me the confidence to keep plodding along and see if it could get good again. I needed to know that it had enough good in it to be worth another 12-20 hours of work.
Eight hours of work later…
I’m maybe not there yet, but it’s definitely improving, and I’m glad that I didn’t just put it in my Pile of Failures. (It’s quite the pile.) With any luck, it will be finished in time for the big show that I’m doing this weekend. I’m now so optimistic about it that I wanted to keep going this evening — even when my hands and back called it quits. That optimism is entirely due to artists whom I like and respect letting me know that my feelings and experiences are normal. They agreed that it looked different because I was pushing myself and trying so many new things, but it would, they assured me, feel more like my work once I started adding vines and leaves again. They liked individual elements that I had created and expressed confidence that the elements could work together if I put in the time to integrate them. They pointed out some details that I could work on in the future… and, also, they really dig the snakes.
There will totally be more snakes.
The takeaway here is that we all need spaces in which we can bring our imperfections and lay them in front of people who will be honest-but-gentle in a good faith effort to walk us through the rough spots. I’m awfully lucky to have access to a space like that for art, and I’m conscious of the need for us all to work harder to create those spaces for one another. We’re all better off for the shared experience and for having taken the time to help one another grow.