Have you ever stood in front of the easel…the cutting board…the lathe; sat in front of the word processor…the lined notepad…the typewriter, or kneeled in front of a flowerbed & longed to really step out, break the mold, do something completely, astoundingly, refreshingly different? In other words, have you ever desired, from the bottom of your quaking heart, to take a creative risk?
Some noble souls seem to always find it easy, perhaps even necessary, to choose the risky, uncharted road over the well-trod one. If you are one of them, we cautious types salute you! For us, though, it’s downright scary to get out of our respective comfort zones. We draw, paint, cook, garden, whatever, in the same ways that have brought us success in the past. Our friends & family “ooh” & “aah” & tell us how talented we are. But deep in our hearts, we know that at least part of the time – harsh as it sounds – we are selling out, creatively speaking. We have the opportunity to take a chance, but we don’t. Why not? Because we don’t want to “mess up.”
Countless times, I remember standing in front of a painting that I had worked on for many days or even weeks. Suspended in the air in front of the painting, my hand gripped an oil pastel stick or a Rapidograph pen or a colored pencil. So very much, I wanted to take a creative leap, but I felt conflicted, confused & even tearful in my frustration. After all, what if I ruined everything that I had worked so hard to achieve thus far? That felt too devastating a prospect to imagine!
But here’s the deal: Each time I failed to act on a longing to take a risk, I was putting another dent in my creative soul. In essence, I was selling myself short. I was acting as though my creative instincts were not to be trusted. And I was denying myself the excitement & challenge of growth in exchange for the “easy A,” so to speak.
Let’s be clear, though. Taking creative risks happens after one has mastered all of the basic knowledge & techniques of one’s medium, be it food, pigment, wood, metal, whatever. One certainly does not take a creative risk with the chef’s knife on the first day of chef’s training or with mushroom-gathering during the first class in edible-mushroom identification. And indeed, the question of creative risk-taking rarely comes up when one is engaging all of one’s mental & physical resources to cope with learning & mastering the basics of a new medium. Once achieved, though, it’s only natural that at some point, the urge to explore, to push the boundaries, to take a chance will occur.
Here are a few things I learned about overcoming the fear of taking creative risks:
1) Give yourself permission to rack up some “safe” successes before you push yourself in new directions. Having these under your belt will build confidence & they will also provide you with a portfolio of surefire “people-pleasers” that you can show others. This will free you up to experiment on more adventurous projects.
2) We are painting & drawing here, not performing surgery or preparing corporate tax returns. If the results of your creative risk-taking fall short of your expectations, remember that a less-than-stellar painting will not result in someone’s death or a stint at a federal prison camp. So what, in the grand scheme of things, are you actually putting at risk? Just some supplies & your time.
3) As for “all-my-hard-work-down-the-drain” thinking, remember this: Every moment spent in front of the easel & behind the brush, pencil, or pen, is time well-spent, regardless of the outcome, because during every one of those moments, you are either learning or practicing.
4) Let’s say you did take a risk & now you are convinced that you’ve painted yourself into a corner, literally: Make a commitment to keep working anyway. Never simply abandon a painting; find some way to make it better. Or, at the very least, just go crazy & really let go. But finish the painting. A case in point: Halfway through my first “mini” painting, I was sure I had ruined it, but I decided to keep playing with it anyway. (After all, I had nothing to lose at that point but some time.) I grabbed a tube of white gouache & continued working. Voilà! I was able to turn the painting around & a new series was born! Had I abandoned the painting earlier, who knows when or if I ever would have experimented with gouache or learned all the things I did that day while salvaging my painting.
5) Make the transition from being goal-oriented to being process-oriented. Creative risks are easier to take when you truly abandon yourself to the process of art-making & stop focusing on – or even caring about – the outcome. When you allow yourself to become process-oriented, you permit your creative soul to have its voice. And that’s when wonderful, astounding, refreshingly different things happen!