Art and perfectionism
My new linocut print, Christ Church Cows, was inspired by seeing them at dawn on a beautiful morning last September. They’re Old English Longhorns, and graze Christ Church Meadow from April to December. One of the things I love about Oxford is that we have incredible places like this right in the middle of our city.
Every print is a bit of a journey into the unknown, no matter how much planning you do, or how firm an idea you have in your head of how you want things to look at the end. I’d initially intended to make the cows more stylised, but I enjoyed drawing them so much that they ended up as a more realistic representation. So the print has ended up a bit of a mixture of styles, which irks me, but hopefully it’ll enable me to move on and make the print that I really want to make. There’s a quote from Shiko Munakata in the book ‘Making Woodblock Prints’ by Merlyn Chesterman and Rod Nelson that I always find comforting when things don’t turn out quite as I’d hoped: “No print is complete in itself. It is one more stake in the ground. It is one more step toward the goal of a lifetime. It is one more prayer that I may reach that goal.” Art and perfectionism are not good bedfellows, and this quote helps me realise that no print will ever be perfect, and that there is no finishing line in art. I’ve brought an image into existence, and that’s really all that matters!
I’ll be honest, I find creating art, going on that journey into the unknown, a pretty scary process. I suppose some of it might be due to the fact that I need to make money from what I create. But the fear existed way before this was my job. The need to make a living certainly adds extra pressure but it’s not the central issue. So let me take you back to my childhood and teenage art experiences… buckle up for some serious self-pity!
I wonder if the root of these fears is down to the combination of having some artistic talent and my personality type (not all that confident, a worrier and an over-thinker being just a few of my traits). Being told you’re talented at art is wonderful, but if you feel a subsequent pressure to be good all the time (either from yourself or others), that is really going take all the fun out of it. If you make a mistake people will find out you’re not really all that good after all! And of course at that age what everyone else thinks matters greatly.
In recent years I’ve come to realise that, although I may not have been conscious of it at the time, as a child I perhaps felt that my artistic talent was something that had been given to me. I hadn’t ‘earned’ that ability through hard work or practice, it was just something I was lucky to be born with. So I wonder if, on some level, I felt that if it had been given to me, maybe it could just be taken away again. This is going to sound incredibly stupid, but my perception as a teenager was that the ability I had was set. I didn’t realise that there was the possibility that I could get better, or develop new ways of creating art. I suppose it should have been obvious from the way we all improved at maths or English with studying, or how people trained at sports and got better and better, but I think I probably saw my art as something entirely different in nature.
I can remember an occasion where I was pleased with some fabric I had drawn. Not long after I tried to draw some more, but this time the result was nowhere near as good. Because of my mindset this seemed disastrous: I had had the ability to draw something well, and then I’d lost it, it was gone forever. I can remember another time being given a brochure featuring A-level artworks by students from other schools in our area. Some of them were absolutely amazing, and seemed far beyond anything I could ever produce. My fragile confidence in my abilities took a huge blow - I would never be as good as these people.
Clearly the sensible thing to do at this point would have been to talk to someone about how I was feeling. But a) teenagers are not exactly renowned for being sensible, and b) my mum had died when I was ten and I used to burying feelings and keeping worries and fears to myself. I think it had probably also made me more fearful of the world. So I just carried on as best I could, feeling disappointed and like a failure, rather than excited about all the opportunities ahead of me. University choices came around and I ended up studying English Literature. Perhaps it seemed like that was more likely to lead to a secure job, and I had romantic notions about becoming a journalist, my dad’s side of the family having worked in the print for several generations. I did become a journalist, and then later moved into communications. I often wonder what would have happened had I gone down the art route at 18 instead. I guess we’ll never know, and anyway, maybe this was the way things were meant to be?
How do you feel about creating art? Drop me a comment and let’s talk!
