Remedying Impostor Syndrome and Looking Ridiculous Doing It

What I did this week:

-Painted a small mural

-Developed “geologic” ways of painting to reflect the conditions of the moons I’m interested in.

-Developed fifty small works, three that were successful

More Specifically:

So I’ve always had this inkling that in order to be an artist, I had to have some innate magic. Because my exposure was so often to finished works, despite my better judgment, I had this association of artists as people with an ability to conjure something from nothing.

And when I couldn’t conjure that magic, which is 90% of the time, I really try to hide it. I wasn’t ashamed of my failure on my own, I just didn’t want to be found out as a non-magical person. Because even if I love being an impostor (the impostors stand to learn the most!) people knowing I wasn’t a mysterious conjuror of good ideas like they were terrified me.

But this week I made something AWFUL (I mean look at this thing) and it kept being awful for hours, and it was SO BIG and everyone saw it, and I was embarrassed.

“Now everyone knows everything I do isn’t beautiful!”

But I kept working, and then, formulaically, predictably, and infrequently… beautiful things happened. And it wasn’t just luck this time, like all things we used to explain with magic, it was really just science. More specifically, statistics. And over time, the frequency of decent to bad work increased.

Itterations Last

Itterations 4-7

So I kept the bad painting, on the big wall with no curtain, because not caring about looking ridiculous (in my own studio) is incredibly productive for my ability to actually create worthwhile work with any kind of consistency.

Andrea told me in passing that the most interesting things in art are fuck-ups. I made a brain tattoo of that.

Oh, also I found out painting the walls is against the rules. But come on, what did facilities expect when they put a bunch of artists in stark white rooms?