Anticipation, Comparison, and Lessons Learned

I have an unfortunate habit of getting ahead of myself.  I’m naturally optimistic and tend to develop grand plans about anything and everything.  The renewal of my artistic practice has been no exception. 

What does this tree study have to do with anything? Read on and find out...

Over the past year, as I’ve been painting more, I’ve heard from countless sources that the first step to being considered a professional artist is to create a collection. For most of the year, I kept this in mind and wondered how exactly one went about such a thing, certain that once I figured it out, I would become “a professional”.

Then inspiration struck.  The idea to do a collection of paintings based around one of my favorite parts of my hometown, a greenway called the Swamp Rabbit Trail, materialized while I was driving home from a run on said trail.  And once I thought it, my brain kicked into overdrive.  Not only did I envision the whole thing, but also the natural extension of it, which would be where I would show it or how I would sell it. And of course, what an immense success it would be.

I hope you can see where this is going... complete mental disaster. Nothing I produced in real life matched what I had in my head.  I felt frustrated.  I felt unsure.  I felt a little defeated.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I like my paintings.  They’re okay.  A few are quite good. But I do the bad thing and I compare myself.  I follow a lot of artists I admire on Instagram and when I look at their artwork I feel like nothing I do could ever compare. They say “comparison is the thief of joy,” and I can attest to the truth in that statement.  

But how do you stop yourself?

Well, I don’t know how to stop this for everyone, but I did stumble upon a way to stop it, at least for me. At least for now. And it actually involves some comparison.  But in a beneficial way. Let me explain.

One day I was drooling over the work of one of my favorite contemporary artists on Instagram.  Internally, I was bemoaning my lack of any talent or ability in comparison. I scrolled and I scrolled through gorgeous work after gorgeous work.  Bad, right? But no.  The more I looked, the more I noticed something.  He paints the same things, over and over again.  Year after year: Christmas lights, neighboring buildings, trees at dusk.  Over and over, year after year.  And as I scrolled backward, I saw his evolution in reverse.  I saw his methods, which I so admire, recede into something a little less amazing (just a little).  My app crashed about four years into the past, but not before I finally internalized a few lessons. 

1. Not only are you allowed to paint the same things over and over again, you should.  Then it becomes more about how you’re painting rather than what you’re painting.  Like Monet and his haystacks (which I’ve known about for forever, but it's Monet, so I never applied that concept to myself.)

2. You need to paint… a lot.  Like, a lot a lot. Like, more than a year’s worth. The more you do, the better you get, the further you evolve.  I’m dissatisfied with what I’m producing because I haven’t produced enough yet.  I need to do them all over again.  And again.  And then maybe again.  And each time, I’ll get closer to what’s in my brain and in my soul. 

3. I need to put the idea of being a “professional” away for a while.  Even though I’m going to start making my work available for purchase, I need to think of myself as very early in my evolutionary journey.  I, Lord willing, have so much ahead of me and I don’t want to get caught up in the pressure of commercial success right now.  Right now I need to be an explorer, not an establishment.

As I type this all out, it seems so obvious, and yet, it wasn’t.  I was getting ahead of myself.  I didn’t understand this critical part of the journey.  But now that I see it, I’m ready to go again. And again.  And again. Because that’s what it's going to take to get to where I want to be.

As it turns out, I should paint this tree a bunch more times because I love it. Yay!