Once you’ve finished a good body of work you may hit a plateau and wonder where to go next. This usually happens when you feel you’ve out-paced the competition and already met all of your own personal expectations.
This is when the bar’s imperative rise rolls in. You must only challenge yourself to do better than yourself, and no one else. If you look to others for a yard-stick to measure your own artistic merit, you will always find those who are less skilled than you, and too easily gain an egoistic gall about your own certain talent and fame.
When we seek solely to improve upon our past accomplishments, we will always feel compelled to work harder—to keep the failures at bay, so to speak. In other words, you’re only as good as your last virtuoso—so you’d better make it another good one before too long.
Another reason to constantly challenge yourself, is your audience is always changing, and you can never count on the loyalty of a painter’s groupies anymore. One way I like to look at it is I’m always a different painter doing a different style, for every piece. This helps me appeal to critics more widely, while always having the freedom to do much better or much worse than I did yesterday.
So stay loose with your craft. Don’t paint yourself into a corner stylistically, or run out of ideas prematurely. Take chances and be brave. The world is full of new concepts. Every moment of thought is a sonnet. Make every piece count. Pour something special into every canvas. Maybe this time it’s only in that you’ve tried a different stroke, or next time you’ve used more yellow.
Once again, art isn’t about the masterpieces. The masterpieces are the desserts. Let’s get through all five courses first. Let’s cherish every morsel of ingenuity for what it’s worth. Let’s dare to challenge every cursed preconception we may carry. Let’s learn to astonish each other with marvelous re-framings every-time without delay.
Let’s become the best versions of ourselves we’ve every imagined. Everyday is a quantum leap or an entropic catastrophe. The spirits of the universe defy natural law by granting someone genius one day and inferiority the next. There is no equation which will guarantee you what you will be tomorrow. So therefore there is hope.
The next time you walk by your blank canvas, where your brush and paint are already set up for you, and you are confident with the art of completion—take that extra breath and question a new path down which none you’ve ever known have ever gone.
Then go down it. Pull out every trick in your bag. Shine your lights and dazzle the eyes. Breath much. Know that later you can choke, but for the moment you must bend to the forces pulling you. You must follow through weaving this new tangent. You must not think. You must not consider.
You must draw on every accomplishment and relationship you’ve ever had and infuse them all into one piece. You must crack the world in half with your consciousness. Throw down your kiddie gloves.
Let’s see who you’ve been trying to be all this time.
You must log in to post a comment.