HAPPY NEW YEAR!! I kind of had a slight nervous breakdown earlier today, maybe. Over my art. Heh.

I've been working on some paintings for this art show that starts next week at the Bristol Grind House. Here's the flyer I put together for it:
Watercolors and Microns on canvas is what I'm doing, because I'm a masochist. I've been working on them for two weeks now maybe. Well, two of them anyways, the other two I started on just last week. It's a narrative, but uh, I didn't really know what the narrative was until the other day? Yep. It was supposed to be just three canvases, then it ballooned into four. When I do things, I have to go about doing them in the most punishing way possible.

Anyways...I had them all in what seemed to be a finished state this morning, and I sat them all side by side, and...and I hated them. And I started to think, "fuck, this was a terrible idea, why did I do this, I should've done something else, fuck fuck fuck." And I contemplated painting over at least two of them, abandoning the narrative and just doing something more thematically tied together? Or throwing all but one out and maybe trying to do something different over the next few days.

I spent three and a half years in the graphic design program at ETSU, and in that time I sat through way too many critiques that would go on for literally two or three days sometimes. I failed my portfolio review three times and shouldn't have gotten another chance. Why they gave me four tries, who knows, but I passed that fourth. What I'm getting at here is that school was really rough on me, my pieces were never really terribly notable during critiques, and a small group of professors I was unfamiliar with mostly thought my work was lousy and I just really had to fight in order to graduate.

So all of these memories were going through my head as I was staring at these paintings, thinking about how they'll be up for a good two or three weeks, seen by dozens of people, people I've never met, never will meet. And they'll be judging them, judging ME based on them, even if they never do meet me or see any of my other work ever again. These four paintings are all I have to make a good impression, to convince these people I've never met that I don't suck. And I'm absolutely blowing it, only ONE of the paintings was really strong, the rest were flat and vague and ugly.

I gave myself a bad head rush and a case of the hiccups as I paced around, panicking, trying to think of what to do. I didn't want to throw them all out and try to do something new when everything has to be done by Sunday for Sterlin to hang. And I didn't REALLY want to paint over the canvases, but I was getting desperate and thinking that was the only way out, I was tired of looking at these crappy paintings.

I told a friend on Facebook that I wish I could just erase three and a half years of art school critiques, to which she responded "Keep this in mind: You're an artist, not an art student...and a really good artist at that."

And that...kind of snapped me out of it. I kept thinking about all the lousy critiques I sat through, being told by professors that my portfolio wasn't good enough for the BFA program, all that negative stuff. And her comment reminded me that people DO enjoy my art, and then I remembered this guy who wrote me on deviantART last week, telling me my gallery was his favorite that he'd seen in years.

So I stopped, took some deep breaths, collected myself, once again looked at the paintings, this time more objectively, and set about working on them once again, all afternoon, until once more they looked like they were pretty much finished.

And I was satisfied this time. I was able to figure out how to strengthen each painting and make them stand on their own while still telling a complete story. All it took was a kind word from a friend to help me step back and clear the black clouds out of my brain.

I guess the moral here is, if you like someone's art? TELL THEM. Let them know you appreciate what they're making. Because artists, we're neurotic as fuck. I often find myself in this hole, hating my work, hating myself for hating my work and not being any good, and it's discouraging. But a comment or two is all it takes to get me back on my feet. 

Anyways. Show goes up on Sunday. I'm gonna take pictures of the individual paintings tomorrow once I've deemed them complete, and post them some time next week. Stay tuned.

(originally posted on my Tumblr)