If you watch a fly, it’s always rubbing its legs together, as it were hatching some master plan, but nothing ever comes of it. The fly always ends up flying away, just when you’d think a climax would take.
Spiders, on the other end, while running their silk, show us constant proof of their productivity, and so therefore, whenever you see an arachnid walk in the room, you always expect some web will follow.
So here you sit before a blank page and your imagination fails you. It is not enough that you’ve set your tools out ahead of time, but now that you’ve finally found your moment and seized it, the demons of self-sabotage are rearing their ugly visages.
At first it seems there are too many options, too many avenues down which to trod, and you can hardly make up your mind which one to pursue, or you try to track them all, and they collide in the process.
Subsequently, caught in a state between not beginning, and not wanting to walk away, you begin to lose focus on all of those brilliant ideas that made you sit down in the first place, and you soon come to experience painter’s block.
Art executed well always seems effortless, but creativity is no mean feat. Being original is as fine a balance as you will find in life, and it takes a truly circumspect spirit to deem itself unique. This having been said, however, there is a limited science one can follow to engender their own inspired pieces.
Firstly, once you begin, thinking ends.
There is no or little room for ponderance once a plan is put in motion. The roots of creation are so deep and strong, once the seeds of art are planted, our only responsibility is to water them and watch them grow.
Choices are made along the way, about how much light and shade to allow for, how much feed is necessary along the way—and when to harvest for maximum ripeness. Ultimately, however, art that is fed by the subconscious comes whole, and it is our duty simply to unfold it.
Now after you’ve plowed ahead for a goodly amount of time, you may want to break as necessary, but returning from time away, always reacquaint yourself with the energy of that former momentum, in order to carry forth to the work’s denouement in a fittingly similar fashion, so as not to hamper unity and symmetry.
Now, finally, you have come to the end of a piece, and for all accounts, it is a decent craft, simply because you have completed it. But there is always editing to follow.
For writers it is called re-writing. For musicians it’s called band practice.
For acrylic painter’s it’s called layering. Now, here I leave oil painters out of the picture, as their entire medium is known for it’s ability to meld composites of their best strokes.
In acrylics and water-colours, however, with such a short drying time (mere minutes for thin washes), there is little room for traditional reworking, as in the other art forms, whereby entire sections are simply replaced with more perfect versions.
In acrylics and water-colours, you only get one run.
Afterward, you can always add layers to increase visual complexity, but if you have any one section you are particularly displeased with, you have lost the race.
This is why I advise you to finish what you’ve started: With unity, comes the strength a cohesive vision instills in its subsequent layering. Suddenly, your second layer is no longer relegated to fixing mistakes, but simply to smoothing minor glitches, and amplifying happy accidents.
Then, by extending this same strict richness inherent in acrylic work toward a unified and quickly completed creation to all of your other mediums, you will increase your efficiency and mastery in them tenfold.
Another reason people don’t end what they’ve begun is they don’t have the next project in mind. This is common amongst amateur or hobby artists, because they haven’t allowed themselves, or don’t want, the freedom to dream big.
Dreams allow us to see things on the horizon you couldn’t normally discern with the naked eye.
Therefore, when dreamers feel like they’re missing out on grander prizes in the distance, it will look as if they are acting irrationally, often babbling incoherently and making decisions with disregard for their present circumstances, but they are simply trying to finish their tasks at hand more efficiently, in order to sooner set out on their more critically self-defining quests.
So, if you aren’t rounding out a task, or topping off a topper. If you haven’t yet finished that story or book, song or album—or painting piece or series … it is because you are prematurely working on your ultimate masterpiece.
What I mean is, the only way we can shoulder the imperfections of creation along the way, is by holding the end vision in our minds so strongly the unity of a piece draws out its own spirit. For we are all solely in competition with ourselves, such temporal beings, striving just to do better than before, and whatever we create along the way can only be truly imperfect versions of what is yet to come.
So if you have not yet thought of what is yet to come, then you must be working on your last project, and therefore your masterpiece. This is why masterpieces are so difficult: They must represent enough substance for us to die or retire on.
In clearer terms, amateurs, hobbyists, and newcomers to the sport of art, who wish to know why they can’t finish some work they’ve started, need only to look to the fact that they are too new at this game to claim theirs is of the finest in its creation.
So, therefore, instead of choking on painter’s block, they should instead rather expect imperfections, as they are the hallmarks of early art by eager artists. They should learn to rely more on unity and completion in their early art careers. It is where creative wings are spread and rusty artsy neurons are first fired, pioneering new fields for the mediums to later on more accurately navigate.
Today’s society, however, frowns upon artists. If they are good, we call them talented and lucky. We don’t usually attribute hard work and persistence to their success. Therefore, when some of us try to cross that tenuous line into becoming an artist, we often recoil at the first signs of failure, judging them to be indicative of our inevitable lackluster success in the field as a whole.
We think so little of art itself as a practiced skill, in fact, that we imagine if the talent isn’t immediately obvious on us, it must not be there. So then, in consequence, we self-sabotage the works, and fail to finish the projects—giving up just when things were looking good, because we were no longer caught in our creative stale-mates.
Then we go back to our lives and complain about never finishing any art we started—claiming we just aren’t talented, when in fact we just never realized, if we’d let ourselves dream bigger, instead of being so conservatively reserved about our artistic ambitions that we were without room for error–we would have finished more along the way, than if we’d spent a lifetime trying to be modestly capable.
So when perspectives toward completion look bleak, throw yourself in headlong and don’t stop until you hit bottom. You can always go back later and layer a little more, or make another pass toward perfection. Then if along the way, things ever seem as though they are coming apart at the seams, just remember, loose strands are merely reminders that you’re weaving a web at all.
So what are you? Fly or spider?
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