A Lesson in Not Being so Hard on Myself

A comment on yesterday’s posting of my progress painting on the HowtoPastel site, led me to a revelation. A woman said I was too hard on myself and I can see what to do different next time.

I thanked her and started to reply, “I don’t expect to be perfect …” I was going to add, “but when I expect a certain look …,” it hit me.

That word, expect, yanked on the reins of my thought process putting a halt on my explaining what I expect when doing a painting. After all, how can I put my full expectations on a painting when I ask the muses and the painting itself for help?

Asking for help and allowing it to happen means giving up some control in what I’m doing. When I open myself to unseen help, the work becomes a collaboration between myself and whatever spirit wants to help, and if this is how I choose to work, I have to stop being so critical of myself and accept maybe this was how the picture is meant to be.

I’ve said before it seems my hands and my logical mind don’t always work together. I believe it’s at these times the other is helping.

This doesn’t mean I can’t make changes. I still have to be satisfied and the painting still needs to be good. “Good” being a flexible word as in good enough … but by whose standards? What does good mean to me?  And if it’s “good enough,” does that mean not quite as good as something else? Maybe I need to just call it “Good!” and not add enough. Yeah, it’s good, period.

There comes a time, too, when I have to stop working, call it done, and move on. I can’t keep trying to make it perfect, which maybe I keep trying to do even when I’m telling myself I don’t. It doesn’t have to look like the photo, because the way I work, it can’t, plus that expected finished look in my mind doesn’t translate out my hands. Walking away also means to stop finding faults. When done, stop performing autopsies on the paintings!

Taking this thinking further, I wonder if my striving for clean sharp lines comes from the types of paintings I like. The way I work, though, and the medium I work in, doesn’t lend itself to that kind of detail (although there are pastel artists who can achieve that look.) However, that’s not my way of working.

When I stop trying to make my paintings perfect, I enjoy what I do. Standing back a few feet, my paintings are beautiful, and I love them, and love my paintings. I will always evolve and get better … better, not perfect. The real goal is to have fun and love what I’m doing. How can I complain when I’m doing that?