Wanting to create

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I want to create. I can't listen to music or read a book or look at photos or art without wanting to go and do that myself. But I can't seem to actually do much. Sometimes I want to do it perfectly, but can't the first time (obviously!), and want to give up. Or I'll try for a while, even having a little success, and something inside me will say "okay, that's enough of THAT" and "make" me quit. I don't get it.

Has anybody else gone through this, and have any ideas for how to get past it? It's something I've come back to over and over again. I've tried "just enjoying" what other people have done, but I come back to wanting to do it myself time and again.

Frustrated,
Dave

Yeah, I have that problem sometimes, too, but you just have to take a break, recharge your motivater and try again. The artist is often his or her own worst critic - you know, I may be wrong about that...I know a lot of artists who are pretty blase about everything they do. The ones I know who are hardest on themselves are myself and a female tattooist diagnosed OCD whom I believe to be a full-blown Aspie. Okay, so I'll rephrase that - Autistic artists are their own worst critics - nothing will do but what the actual result matches identically to the ideal in our heads.

The problem is, it almost never does. So you just keep going - either redo the same piece until you're satisfied with it (thank gods for erasers and white-out), or move on to the next idea and try to improve with the practice. The first time I got tattooed, I brought my own artwork in with me, after working on it for months until I was satisfied it was something I could wear for a lifetime. I was explaining to the tattooist, whom I'd handpicked out of dozens around the area, that I was concerned that everything be just perfect and he laughed out loud and said "There is no such thing as perfection in tattooing - its all about the illusion of perfection."

I thought I knew, as an artist myself, what he meant, but I discovered a few years later when I began learning that particular medium just how little I really understood his meaning. It's arduously demanding, even when you're working off a stencil you spent weeks perfecting - there is zero margin for error. Part of the art is learning how to make mistakes look like an intentional part of the design, because once that mark is in the skin, its in the skin for good. No do-overs. So sometimes you're forced to improvise - but that's what makes every piece truly unique. You can do the same design a hundred times and each example will have slight variations, some visible only to the artist who did the work.

Anyhow, what I'm saying is, it ultimately has to be about the work - its the journey, not the destination. Once in a while you'll absolutely love the end result...but if you don't love doing the work itself, you'll never maintain the motivation to develop real skill. Think of the act of creation as a stim. Keep at it long enough, your Autistic nature will kick in and make it a routine. Then you won't be able to stop doing it.

It's standard procedure we all turn out tons of crap before anything worthwhile occurs and that's usually just luck. Get used to it.

That's the skill I want! To know how to recharge my motivater!



I think I might have learned that a while back, then got off track. So here I am learning it again. But yeah, there are two different feelings there: 1) how awesome it feels to see what somebody else does, and 2) how it feels to do it myself. They're two very different things, and I get so frustrated that I can't feel #1 when I'm starting out trying to learn to do a thing. But it never feels like #1 doing it yourself, even when you get "really good", (whatever that means). And in my case, I've been doing programming for 25 years, and am "good" at it, and probably impress some folks (like I'm impressed by creators), but it's just different.



Well, that's the funny thing. I played with Betty Edwards' book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain a few years ago, and true to her promise, after a week or so, I made a couple of drawings that surprised the heck out of me. Not high art, but stuff I never imagined that I could do. Not what I thought of as crap. But looking back, it was a lot of work, and the perfectionist side of me was probably scared stiff of any outcome, good or bad. Bad would be failure, and good "wasn't a possibility" (at that early stage), so I panicked and went and did something else.

The solution to that, too, is just to find what I enjoy doing, and do it (if I understand you both correctly).

Heavy sigh. Why do I make it so hard, though?

Thanks, both of you, now to find work I love to do.

Dave