It's Your Art
Mon, December 5, 2011 at 07:42PM [reprinted from summer 2009]
"Courage begins with the decision to face the ultimate truth about existence: the dirty little secret that we are free. It requires an understanding of free will at the archetypal level -- an understanding that we are free to define who we are at every moment. We are not what society and randomness have made us; we are what we have chosen to be from the depth of our being. We are product of our will. We are self-made in the deepest sense."
~ Peter Koestenbaum
a home along a canal in Amsterdam
Do you feel good about life when you are drawing, art journaling, painting, knitting, sewing, sculpting, writing, acting, experimenting, embroidering, photographing, sketching, doodling, carving, building, creating, singing, editing, embellishing, collaging, designing, dancing, discovering, inventing, collecting and gardening?
How do you feel if you don't do anything creative for a week or two?
Is life better when you do creative stuff, or when you don't?
Well that's just it, then.
It's the doing. Not the outcome.
You are not designing a page for The Smithsonian as the ONE & ONLY EXAMPLE OF 21st CENTURY ART JOURNALING.
You are playing with color, words & images.
So just play.
Relax, explore, and find a happier life along the way.
Trick Your Inner Perfectionist and Become an Art Journalist.
When you stop worrying about what others think of your art, you may just find the secret to your most amazing work.
6 Comments Tweet | Email Article | Print Article | Share Article | Permalink | in creativity, ideas, perfectionism
Reader Comments (6)
Thank you for this post! I really needed it today.
I so agree, Tammy. I like to get it on with it and just do it.
amazing quote. I love that, it's so true. And it's so true about art. When I work in my journal, I'm so free because I don't care what others think about it, because it's an expression of myself, of who I am as a person and an artist and nothing I do inside those pages can be wrong, no matter what.
I think I realize that less when I'm working on other art, especially photography, but I think I need to remember that more often.
:)
Great post, Tammy! Very encouraging.
{Tammy}: Andria, Thank you for your kind note.
Wonderful quote Tammy - very thought-provoking. It's right up there with "You don't have to catch up - you just have to start."
And thank you so much for the link to 'how to trick your inner perfectionist.' I now have a Test Journal - what a wonderful title! It has a spiral binding so I can rip pages right out if I want to - I have permission! Or I can staple 2 pages together until later, or forever. And if I like a page I can remove it and put it in another journal - what ever I choose, I am free to do.
How come you understand how crippling perfectionism can be? Are you a reformed one?
{Tammy}: Wendy, Thank you. I'm happy that you have a test journal where you can do whatever you want to do. Gradually I hop that you will see all of your pages as test zones, experiments, places to play!
And your question - how do I know about perfectionism? I'm so, so analytical and that can be horrible when making decisions. Plus I receive hundreds of emails from people who describe their fear of screwing up their art journals, their fear of the blank page. So I try to look at it from that perspective. For some reason, in art I have no perfectionism, I just focus on the DOING rather than the result.
This website is the haven I've been searching for. Thank you so much for putting so much work into it :) . Bless you.