Inspiration Fridays! Run Naked into Battle!
Run Naked into Battle!
Perfection is not only impossible… it’s boring.
“Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn’t painting be too?” – Edgar Degas
Dreams where I would show up to school with no pants on used to be a regular thing for me. I’m pretty sure there is some deep Jungian meaning here and I’ve probably already overshared, but that’s also how it felt for me to leave any part of my work unfinished. I used to try to hide every drawn line under the paint. The fact that I had to draw it in the first place was just another example of how difficult the whole process was for me. I didn’t want people to see my process or even imagine that I had one. I would be caught standing, knock-kneed in front of the class, with no pants on. The funny part of that dream was that no one ever noticed. All the kids would head out to the playground and I would remain, white-knuckled, knees under my desk, with no way to escape.
What preconceived notions about how your art is “supposed” to look are haunting your subconscious?
We can all get stuck in our heads. That fear of being discovered as a fraud, the need to justify what we do or somehow prove that we are worthy, is something that everyone has to tackle at some point on this journey. With that in mind, the beauty in this life is most luminous when we can share the story of how we overcome our obstacles. There is beauty in seeing the process. What if we painted holding space for the idea that at every stage, the painting could be done? The drawn image is beautiful on its own. Add some color… still beautiful. Lose the drawing, find it again, scrape it out, put it back.
It’s easy to become fixated on the results. The unfortunate casualty of result-oriented thinking is that there are often some extraordinarily beautiful moments along the way that we never have a chance to see.
This week while you are painting, experiment with the idea of removing yourself from the equation. See if you can’t look at your painting as if you have never seen it before and have no expectation for how it is supposed to look. Sometimes looking at a painting of yours in this way can be surprising. Sometimes the painting has already arrived and all that we need to do in order to see it is to remove the lens of who we think we are supposed to be.