I made something and hated it. I even said that out loud.
My partner and I had decided to do a mini art night, after I found a pad of watercolour paper at the dollar store earlier in the week. I think it was Ryan’s suggestion to paint lupines, one of my favourite local wildflowers. I found varying-length YouTube paint-alongs and tutorials; we selected one and started off.
And wooooof. I hated the first line. Waaaay to saturated, should have blotted that brush some. Whoops.
The critic in my head is a little louder in this season of life than it has been in the recent past.
And I registered all of the “shoulds” as not my own voice, but felt the weight of them before I could name it as conditioning and move through releasing those thoughts. I felt it in my body, and as I became more heavy with this feeling of failure, my painting continued to get “worse” and “worse”.
This is a little real talk—I highlight conditioning as much as I do in other posts because the awareness of the conditioned narratives helps to divest from them. But sometimes, there’s just not enough capacity to sit and evaluate, or even witness and understand these thoughts and feelings. Sometimes we just feel the weight, maybe feel ‘kinda off’, or disappointed by the end of what we’re working on.
Starting a bad art practice is one antidote to that inner perfectionist voice, and the external demand for polished, sellable work, only please.
Turns out, the next day, after the feeling of ‘failing’ had dissolved (at least somewhat), I didn’t hate the painting as much as I thought I did originally. I’m certain I had judged it more harshly because of the feeling like I did something wrong, or I “could have done better”.
Babe, that’s how we learn <3
And for what it’s worth, I liked the second piece I did that night. Maybe my lupines watercolour painting was my ‘bad art’ practice for the night, which opened me up to creating something I was happy to produce and share with some friends.