At the beginning of my first drawing lesson, the art instructor sat down at the bench & demonstrated how to begin a drawing of the fruit & bottle arranged on the shelf in front of us. I was amazed to see him searching for the correct lines as he worked instead of simply drawing the bottle & fruit straightaway. Of course, the notion that he would draw every line in its precise place without having to alter anything seems pretty silly to me now, but at that moment, it was a huge revelation to me to watch him build the drawing rather than just putting it there.
Fast forward several years: One day I was in my studio struggling with an oil painting & doubting my chances of ever getting it right, when I suddenly had another major revelation: “Making art” is this very struggle. In other words, I realized that if I wanted to be an artist, then I had to make peace with – & maybe someday, even learn to enjoy – the struggle that takes place between the first stroke of pencil on my preliminary sketch & the last stroke of pigment on the finished painting. If I was unable to reconcile myself to this “struggle,” then I must cease making art. Right then & there, I decided that I wanted to make art – meaning, I wanted to engage in the art-making process – no matter what the outcome. Good, bad, or indifferent, I was committed to being an artist.
These were two memorable instances when my intransigent perfectionism ran headlong into the realities of learning to draw & paint. In the first instance, I was quickly disabused of the idea that I would be taught how to put a drawing down on the paper neatly & succinctly, if not quickly. Instead, I found myself having to live with a messy, confused tangle of lines for uncomfortably long periods of time – scary stuff for a lifelong perfectionist (with possible hints of OCD). On top of that, my teacher would say, “It’s OK for the lines to get all smudged; stop worrying about it!” (Yikes!) Yes, it took a long time for me to view the smudges & confusion as evidence of progress rather than as evidence of failure.
With my second realization, I was finally able to completely let go of the end result – the finished painting – & instead, to surrender myself to the “struggle.” Of course, it’s common for artists & self-help gurus to speak of “journey” instead of “struggle” (in the same way that bosses & politicians speak of “opportunities” instead of “problems”), but the word “struggle” is not one to be avoided at all costs for it signifies the great effort that is put forth in order to achieve something worthwhile. “Struggle” or “journey,” each word is just another name for “process,” the essence of making art.
I’ll suggest some ways to ditch perfectionism in the next post….