Any artist, whether a painter, musician, actor or author, would attest to having been at that point- you stare at the empty page or canvas and cannot bring yourself to start. Many anxieties run through your mind- if you start what if you do it wrong and end up hating it? What if the world doesn’t like it? What if it doesn’t meet up to your ideals of how you envisioned it or live up to the standards of artists you admire?
You wonder whether this means that you are not a ‘true’ artist and just an imposter. Maybe you have been lying to yourself all this time and that canvas or page will be your downfall, the one to finally reveal you. You have lied to everybody up till now and now they will know the truth.
If you have had any of these anxieties, congrats! You are a true artist and human being because nobody- none of your idols, none of your peers, nobody- has gone through life without them. So you can relax!
Okay but now what?
You still harbour all these anxieties, just because you know everybody else has doesn’t mean they are gone. Well these questions used to paralyse me as well but my studies in psychology have provided some answers that have helped me. I will share some of these findings and hopefully they may guide you in figuring out your own path.
The the anxiety of whether you can meeting an ideal that you set for yourself is very common and can be very discouraging. Will what you produce be good enough? What does your work say about who you are, as an artist and a person? This anxiety is crippling and this strive for perfection can render you incapable of even starting for fear of failing.
To gain insight on this process, an experiment was undertaken whereby a ceramics teacher divided the class into two groups. Half were graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, whereas the other half on its quality. The quantity group would get an ‘A’ if they produced 50 lbs of pots, ‘B’ if they produced 40 lbs and so on. The quality group simply had to produce one pot- but it had to be perfect- to get an ‘A’
Interestingly, the works that were highest quality were all made by the ‘quantity’ group! This is because while the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection and had not produced anything, the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes.
So what can you learn from this?
For me, it helped demonstrate that quantity leads to quality. Isn’t that so freeing? Rather than having to ensure your product is perfect, you are free to just make it! Free to make as much as you like and to fail without having to conclude that it means you are not a real artist. Make a bad one and then another and another! It gave me permission to write that terrible chapter, to draw that ugly portrait, to fail.
So give yourself permission to suck, permission to fail, permission to not achieve your ideal. This will free you to do as many as you can and the more you do it the better you’ll be!