Being self critical
Ok, I am a pretty self critical person. I show this alot on my website’s. I jsut look at other people’s work I just think “Wow, I’ll never be like that!” or I look at it and think “Dammit, Wilson! You gotta get to that stage!” I don’t always think it. Infact it is sort of a rare thing for me.
Recently I got an e-mail from Travis:
”Hey Ben,
Stop being so critical of your art!!! Your quote “I will admit, my art still is not good”.
Your art will always be evolving, changing as you find your style, changing as your inject your life experiences into your art. What you do is never finished. It just continues to grow.
If you look back at Charles Schultz Peanuts strip (Charlie Brown) when it began in the 1920’s or 30’s, you can see how disjointed and primitive it was then as a strip as compared to his final years doing the strip. Your art is not bad. It is changing as you change, it expands as you develop new technique and ideas. Your art comes from where you are at this point today in life.
That all said, I wish you the best success as you pencil the next year and many more after that.
Your crazy American chum,
Travis”
Then in a second e-mail he goes on to say:
“What you feel you may lack at times in your art, you certainly make up for with your dedication to improving your art.”
Now, these are good words. It is true that as we go on our art improves more every day. I also think that there is no “Best”, just people who are good at something who can always get better.
BUT, I seem to look at my stuff and then look at someone elses and say “Wow man your’s is so good.” Then they would look at mine and say “NO, your’s is good!”. It gets to be a cycle. This happend today with my grade at school doing history speeches. I would say to someone “Wow, you were so good and confident. I wish I was like that!”. Then they would say to me “No, man, I totally stuffed it up you were so focused and had great points. Way better than mine!”. Vicious cycle. This happened alot to day. This is just one example of my next point.
We look at our stuff and automatically think we need to get better to get at the top level of awesomeness or whatever. This may not be the case with everyone, but from what I have seen most people are pretty self critical. That is just how most of us are.
Thanks for reading,
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment