The Creative Struggle of the Painter - the Charmed Life.

I painted this picture a few months after I began painting. I chose this because I remember all the positive encouragement I received at the time. It was a heady experience and I was overwhelmed by it all. But, I should add that it was painted before I had began to learn about the art of critiquing.

Because I lacked critiquing tools and because there were no personal guides surrounding me, who could offer me constructive suggestions about how to paint, I inhaled the words of praise and they went straight to my head. I lived a charmed life.

Looking back at it all, 5 years later, after reading today's Painter's Keys, by Robert Genn - I could see the process and what was happening with greater clarity.

There is also a past world, a present world, and a future world. A highly literate artist with glowing optimism for the future is dead in the water if she's not seeing her present world with clarity. She may have to buckle down and improve her work. She may have to make sacrifices. She may have to rethink her vision. She may have to reinvent her education. Her predicament may be further confused by the seemingly charmed life she likes to project. She may need to learn that the really charmed life is earned, and, according to Adoquei, it may not always be charming.

My development of critiquing skills changed all that. Some would say that my personal critiquing resulted in my raising the bar so high that I no longer felt good about what I did, because I could see my inadequacies.

So it was. I wandered from'la la' land into the land of reality. And, here's the rub. Now when I paint I rarely feel happy anymore with my works. When my signature is slashed across the bottom of the work, I sign it off. The slate is cleared and its removed from my mind. The ache in my belly and the pain of birth is done. Finis.



You can read this newsletter by Robert Genn by clicking here.