Give Yourself Time
When you’re first getting into art, an art class is a great way to throw yourself in.
But you might find that this (really great) choice has some consequences…mainly overwhelm. All those other artists. Some better. Some younger. Some more driven. It can be enough to turn around and walk back to your car.
Annie O’Brien Gonzales (Ep.1) 100% felt terrified when she returned to a painting class after decades away. To combat that overwhelm she needed to change how she was approaching the problem.
And then a teacher gave it to her.
The teacher told her, “Don’t judge anything until you've done a hundred paintings.”
And so Gonzales got to work. She suspended all judgment about her potential as an artist. She painted. She finished the piece. And she put it under her desk.
Painted. Put it under her desk.
She didn’t judge these or herself as an artist by any of the pieces. Her only goal was to get to 100 paintings before she began to think about anything other than getting to work.
Put it to Practice:
Learning to paint takes time. Not just within a given day but in days over weeks or months.
While you might have the instinct to want to judge all of your artistic process by the one piece under your hands right now, it’s actually not a great way to judge your work. An artist (yes you) is a body of work. Not just one or two pieces each year.
For this reason, it can be useful to set up systems so that you create a bunch of work without judgment. And then once you’ve finished, say a 100 paintings, you then lay them all out and review strengths and weaknesses and use those to decide where to go next. (Plus take a moment to celebrate how amazing you are for working as hard as you did.)