Art and fear are old friends. There is literally a book called “Art and Fear” (which I own). What’s interesting is that this fear isn’t an innate quality of art making. Rather, it’s something that we’re taught. In late 2017 I read the book “Your Inner Critic is a Big Jerk: And Other Truths About Being Creative” by Danielle Krysa and she laid out some really simple truths that I’d never considered before. The main thing I took away was that my fear stemmed from criticism. When we’re kids, we just make art because we enjoy it. But at some point, someone tells us what we’ve created is right or wrong and why it’s not good.

You develop these little voices in your head that tell you what you’ve made is terrible and no one would ever like it. So you settle for doing something else or keep working but never show your work. I still think about the time a visiting artist did a group critique of our advanced painting class and I volunteered to go first. All I can remember is the wave of anxiety and dread that came over me when he said something to the effect that my imagery was “a bit on the nose”. I literally didn’t hear anything else he said and later when I told someone how awful I felt that he hated my work, they had no idea what I was talking about. Apparently I didn’t remember any of the good comments because I immediately shut down after the bad. I really wish I could remember the good comments because I still love this artist’s work.

So on Day Two of my Residency, I was hit with a wave of anxiety because the “big inspiration” hasn’t hit me yet. I know what I want to create but I always stop myself when the voice in my head whispers “a bit on the nose, isn’t it?” But I pushed through, I’ve worked hard to get to this point and I’m just getting started. I worked on my screen from last week as NOW I remember from printmaking, you should always have multiple projects going so you can keep working on one while you wait for the other to dry (there’s always something that needs to dry). I used a squeegee to draw down the screen filler and once that dried, used water to wash out all the dried drawing fluid. Then, sometime in the coming weeks, I’ll be able to make some actual prints!

Don’t judge my tape job

I used the rest of the time to work on another oil painting portrait study. I’ve been using the iOS app Sktchy for stock images. People sign up and share photographs with the specific purpose of being used as inspiration for artists. There is literally an app for everything now