Perfectionism

Show Notes

00:00 Welcome to the Art Against Mental Illness Podcast
00:14 The Journey of Art and Creativity
00:55 The Trap of Perfectionism
01:01 Perfectionism in the Modern World
03:14 The Creative Process and Knowing When to Stop
06:11 The Subjectivity of Art and Avoiding Comparisons
09:36 Dealing with Your Inner Critic
11:19 Homework and Final Thoughts
12:10 Support and Follow Alex Loveless

Transcript

[00:00:00] / Welcome to the Art Against Mental Illness podcast. My name is Alex Loveless and this is my podcast about the healing powers of art. For artists, art lovers, the art curious, and anyone with an interest in mental health and well being.

[00:00:14] So I’ve talked so far about arts and creativity being a journey. A process of processes. A long line of moments, some of which result in beautiful things being produced. Those moments where we actually finished something might come to him frequently. But as I alluded to in the last episode, They’re also somewhat beside the point. It all counts, not just the showy bits. But the showy bits is still important to most of us, and give people those moments of connection that happened when you experienced great art. But it’s easy to obsess over those moments to make them the only thing that matters and to obsess about making them perfect. To obsess about making your work perfect. But here there be dragons.

[00:00:57] Perfectionism. Isn’t just the preserve of creation. It pervades the modern world and imposes itself on every corner of our lives. Due to the fact that most people only share their best moments on social media and angle and doc to them so that they showed the best version of themselves possible. It’s easy to believe that your life has dull and insipid while everyone else is loading it up.

[00:01:20] And maybe you think you’d feel a bit better if everyone thought you were also loading it up. And so you get sucked into the same cycle. Everyone is glaring into their little rectangular screen, feeling worthless and looking for a little moments to share that will hopefully dupe the world into thinking they’re happy and carefree.

[00:01:37] This can lead to some very dark places and increasingly is doing so.

[00:01:42] The reports that arise in occurrences of anxiety, depression, suicide, and eating disorders may not be exclusively related to the inescapable devices and FOMO, but it’s pretty clear that this has had a big influence.

[00:01:55] This behavior is a form of perfectionism and it’s corrosive. You find yourself in permanent optics mode. Always feeling the need to optimize, improve, remove floors, airbrush, Photoshop. A whole industry has sprung up around this, but in reality, for most of us, this is not lipstick on a pig or polishing a turd.

[00:02:14] It’s more like taking something beautiful and alive and pickling it. Sticking a pin in a butterfly. I think it leaks into every part of our lives. Everything we own and do has to be perfect in case someone else sees it. And soon there are no safe spaces. Nowhere you can relax. Not because other people can see you, but because you can.

[00:02:34] Perfectionism is something that I think pretty much all good artists suffer from. I say good artists. Cause there are narcissists out there that produce art, a corrupt firmly believing it to be genius. They suffer from the opposite of perfectionism.

[00:02:47] But for the rest of us, it’s a persistent blight. I think it’s especially pervasive in the early stages of the creative journey before you’ve really found your voice, your audience, your confidence. And before, you know what good looks like for you, but artists of all levels of experience and popularity experience it. To a degree it’s inevitable. And sometimes even appropriate and helpful, but most of the time it’s not. Most of the time it’s a destructive illusion.

[00:03:14] So what is perfectionism? In the context of the creative process, maybe it’s easier to define what it’s not. The opposite of perfectionism is knowing when to stop knowing when a piece of art is finished, ready to ship. One of the most important skills you learn as a creator is knowing when to stop. When stand back and say, that’s enough. It’s not as easy as you might think sometimes, but very rarely work is obviously finished. Just as you conceived it to be done. This has never happened to me, not least because I don’t plan my works. They just tend to emerge. So the idea of done is a little more fluid.

[00:03:51] I think even the most meticulous and deliberate artists expect and encourage an element of randomness in their work. Artworks without this tend to be flats and style, in my opinion. Most artists aren’t very deliberate in my experience. That’s kind of the point of our otherwise it’s really just manufacturing.

[00:04:09] So the concept of done is a kind of mutable or ephermeral one one. And it’s often very hard to know when something is done. When asked how I know when a painting is finished, I always find it hard to give a satisfactory answer.

[00:04:23] As an aside, I think only other artists ever asked this question. Everyone else seems to imagine that our work exudes from a magic unicorn horn, maybe it’s better that they do.

[00:04:33] But I’m not a unicorn. And my work takes, well, work. So when pressed on how I know when a piece of artists finished, the best answer I can think of apart from the unicorn horn, one is. " When adding more to it would make it less good."

[00:04:48] This is a deeply on satisfactory response, even to me. Some obvious objections being surely a work in production goes through peaks and troughs. You can’t just bail on it because something went wrong. I’m always cooking things up while in flow. In fact, I generally encourage mistakes. Some of the best work I’ve done is as a result of happy accidents. There’ve been times when I’ve created a finished work that I wish based on photo evidence that I’d stopped adding too many iterations ago.

[00:05:14] The second, and much more confounding objection is simply the usual follow-up question again, usually from artists.

[00:05:21] How do you know what good looks like? The answer to that is the same answer that I should have given in the first place. And one that is even less satisfactory than the other answers. Which is, well, you just sort of know.

[00:05:33] No one likes a smart ass is a usual irritated reaction to that.

[00:05:37] But unfortunately it’s the only meaningful answer, even if it’s only actually meaningful to me. This type of response is especially galling to beginners who just assume you’re being obtuse or aloof or evasive, or just playing condescending.

[00:05:49] The naive response. And one often emerges from beginners is see what other people think finished looks like and use that as a guide. And this is where we get into seriously ugly territory, because what you’re really saying is I’m going to compare my work to someone else’s, which is always an, I mean, always a terrible idea. And the last we find ourselves back to perfectionism.

[00:06:11] You see. The experience of art is deeply subjective and deeply intimate, even in the most shallow kind of art. Everyone’s art has its own signature, both figuratively, and literally that is as unique as their fingerprint. This is called style of voice. So, of course you can compare your work to others in the same genre. But your finished and their finished may be and should be very different.

[00:06:35] Even if you set out to copy someone else, presuming that is you’re not a forger, then you should and will diverged from that to develop your own flavor. This is how art works. And since it’s their style that can only have ever emanated from them, you cannot possibly replicate yet. But what many people do is set their sights on reverently, emulating another artist, and then tear themselves apart, failing to do so. All the while berating themselves for not producing the quality of peace that they set out to do. At that point, it doesn’t really matter how good your actual work is. It will never be good enough. You’re looking at it through the wrong eyes. This is perfectionism. Not then the pursuit of perfection, but a pursuit of emulation. The pursuit of someone else’s idea of perfection. The result of this can only be consistent failure. Not failure to produce good work, but failure to recognize your own good work.

[00:07:29] This is a disastrous outcome. It’s demoralizing and depressing and stressful, and it’s stopped many a budding creative in their tracks. Many simply give up at that point. And that’s a terrible outcome.

[00:07:41] But much like the perfect selfie obsession. It’s an illusion, a self-imposed self destructive doom loop.

[00:07:47] And one that you need to get out of ASAP, if you want to make good work. More importantly, at least in my view, you need to shake this attitude because it largely negates the therapeutic value of the process of creation. Since statistically speaking, you might want to use the healing power of art because of the anxiety is brought on by social and societal pressures. Letting the very same predator in the ring is probably not the best idea.

[00:08:12] And perfectionism is hard to spot. Not least because it doesn’t just come into form I’ve already discussed . For more experienced scientists. That’s the genius that they have been trying and failing to emulate is actually themselves. Too many creators can get sucked into the doom spiral of trying to recreate supposedly former glories. Rather than recognizing and celebrating their own progression. Not least because those former glories are a result of praise from others, particularly in the artist’s formative stages. Paying too much attention to your fans or critics is a dangerous game. And one that I’ll no doubt revisit at some point.

[00:08:46] But understand this, the only opinion that really matters is your own. Other people tend to sell you things that you want to hear for all the nicest possible of reasons. That earlier supposed master work might well, just be an average early work that found the right eyes after all Bob Ross has a lot of fans, but did you really want to get off the bus at his stop and stayed there forever? Even if you did produce an actual item of genius, that was then, and this is now. And did we not talk already about art, being all about the process? Move on your life may depend on it.

[00:09:18] Whatever form your perfectionism takes it’s always destructive and rarely leads to actual good works. Usually at least a flat finicky, emotionally stunted works or just an overworked brown mess that gets discarded. Or even worse, no work at all. And it always, always leads to misery and disillusionment. Perfectionism is an evasive animal that prefers not to be seen, but hides in plain sight. It is irrationality masquerade thing has common sense.

[00:09:47] I’m aware that this leaves the troublesome question of how to know when a work is finished or. Sometimes I do just know. Sometimes it do keep going a little too long and realize that I’m making a perfectly good work, well, less good. Hopefully not too much less good that it’s ruined.

[00:10:01] But more often, I get to the point where I think a piece may be finished. And just can’t decide. I have a special solution for this type of situation. I asked myself. No, no stop getting angry with me. I’m not being obtuse and condescending again. What I mean is I simply put that work aside, preferably where I can’t see it. For a few days, weeks, months, sometimes even years. Then at some point, go back to look at it. Nine times out of 10 I know immediately if it’s finished and if it’s not, the fix is usually immediately apparent. And sometimes I realize that it’s a complete Turkey and hide it away again until I decide what to do with that. And that’s fine too.

[00:10:39] But the fresh eyes are important. You need to get some distance between yourself and that work. That person who revisits that work is a different person, even though it’s still, you. And there’s no better, more caring and nurturing supporter that then yourself. There’s also none harsher critic. But now we’re back to perfectionism again.

[00:10:57] And that’s where this all really comes back to. We are our own worst critics. Sometimes this is necessary, but most of the time it’s not and left unchecked. It can become pathological. Believe me. I know. The good thing is, whereas we can’t control our critics out there in the real world.

[00:11:13] We can control to a degree, at least our inner critic. At the very least we can ignore them or tell them to shut the hell up.

[00:11:19] And so to your homework. Go and find some work that you didn’t like, but haven’t seen for a while. Maybe a sketch that you followed at the back of your sketchpad. So they one can see it. Might be an old short story that you never shared with anyone because you thought, it was lame. Go look at it again and observe how it makes you feel. Maybe it’s still a turkey, but maybe there’s something there. Maybe there’s something you can work into something else you can be proud of. Or maybe it’s a forgotten work of genius.

[00:11:45] Recently, I was sorting through some old discarded artworks, and I found a watercolor landscape with it. I remember thinking at the time was terrible. Well it’s car. Isn’t really my medium. Anyway. But seeing it again, I was actually gobsmacked. It might be the best water color I’ve ever done. I kid you not.

[00:12:01] So go have a rummage and I’ll see you next time when I’ll be talking about the scariest, but perhaps the most rewarding part of the creative journey, sharing your work.

[00:12:10] I, hope you enjoyed this episode and found it helpful if you did, I’d love for you to support me by hitting the like button and following me on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. Your support helps me reach more listeners so that I can continue bringing you the content that you love. Don’t forget to leave a review and share this episode with everyone that you know, that might find it helpful or valuable.

[00:12:30] If you want to find out more about me, I can be found on Facebook. At Alex Loveless artist. On Instagram. At Alex M Loveless and my website. Is Alex.