Profoundly Creative

I love to daydream. As I child, I happily spent hours in my head, making up and living in alternative realities. I was a banker, a movie star, a famous novelist. I drew portraits and hosted my own museum show in my bedroom for an audience of one (they loved it). I taught my stuffed animals everything I knew about math and language (they were excellent students). I organized my Lego collection into a hardware store, each type of piece arranged into its own compartment for easy retrieval. My life was a running movie, complete with soundtrack and dialogue.

As I grew up, past my teens and into my twenties, I had the idea that I was meant to be an artist. To my credit, I did draw and paint a fair amount. But my efforts were meandering and I also worked as a writer and event producer and had a boyfriend. You know how it goes (spoiler alert: not very far).

At some point, I decided to get serious and started collecting how-to books about what it takes to make a living as an artist. I gained a lot of insight, and a lot of paralysis.

My biggest takeaway from all this reading, which led to a lot of overthinking and anxiety, was that (duh) you couldn’t make a living as an artist, or put any of the strategies in any of the books into place, until you had made the work. And not just any work, but good work. Work that people would recognize as uniquely your own, and that was of high enough quality that they would want to purchase it.

Now, from a distance, these parameters seem very clear and straightforward. Unfortunately, for a daydreamer and overthinker like myself, they can lead down a path of overthinking and self-sabotage. I had never really worked in a series before, let alone creating a body of work of 15 – 30 pieces that would hold together as a gallery show.

I spent a lot of time, too much time, thinking about all the different possibilities of what I could make, which galleries I could approach, what my artist statement should say. And I stared at a lot of blank canvasses and pieces of paper, not making anything.

Eventually I learned that you can’t will a masterpiece into being, and you also can’t wait around forever for divine inspiration to hit. The only way to be an artist is to actually make work, even if it falls short of expectations (and most times, it will, especially at the beginning). Each piece is a starting point, and without a starting point, there is nothing.

So, how do you start? This is something we explore a lot in the Profoundly Creative membership, because finding a way to begin can feel scary and elusive. At its heart, though, beginning often just starts with making a mark or a line on the page, or writing down a word, and then another. It often means setting aside any idea of what the end product is going to look like, and just starting with what’s in front of you, and then adding and subtracting until you get to a place with the piece where it feels complete.

The process can be slow, and messy, and sometimes results in work that never feels right or finished. (Spoiler alert: like a lot of artists, I have a big pile of unfinished/underwhelming drawings and paintings that I would never show anyone else. Sometimes I paint over them and start again, other times I cut them up and add the pieces to new work. The worst ones end up in the recycling.)

The thing is, though, sometimes magic happens and the lines and images and ideas and colours all come together in a way that works. And while those moments can’t be planned, I guarantee they don’t show up unless you do. Which is why it’s so important to just start.

So please: Find a quiet spot and open your sketchbook or journal, and risk putting something down. You never know what it will turn into.