Perfectionism and Quality

There’s such a fine line between the two. On the one hand, you don’t want to put crappy art­work out into the world. You want your best stuff out there rep­re­sent­ing you.

On the other hand, per­fec­tion­ism can be crip­pling – I should know. I’ve got an awful case of it.

Keith Bond wrote a guest arti­cle yes­ter­day on Fine Art Views called “The Wiper” and that’s what got me think­ing about it. He wrote about attend­ing a work­shop given by Matt Smith. They watched him paint a beau­ti­ful demo and then found out the next day that he’d wiped it out, because it wasn’t up to his standards.

On the one hand, I can com­pletely appre­ci­ate this – there are many works I’ve painted that have been ges­soed over a month later because it just wasn’t work­ing. Keith Bond quotes him as saying:

“He explained that when he first started out paint­ing, a huge per­cent­age of his paint­ings were ‘wipers’. He didn’t want mediocre work out there. He con­tin­ued to wipe off any­thing that he wasn’t com­pletely excited about.”

This is where I start to struggle.

If I wiped out every paint­ing I wasn’t com­pletely excited about, then I’d have no paint­ings. In every sin­gle piece, I hit a stage where I think I’ve screwed it up com­pletely, and that there’s no hope. Some­times I’m right, but a lot of the times I’m wrong and a very nice piece man­ages to emerge from the wreckage.

So where do you draw the line? Where do you just let your cre­ativ­ity run free and where do you cull the lesser pieces? At what point do you bring in that crit­i­cal eye to decide which pieces are to be shown and which ones should be burned or painted over?

I think that the answers lie with the indi­vid­ual. Unfor­tu­nately, I don’t think there can be a blan­ket, one-size-fits-all solu­tion to this.

Some of us are apt to think every­thing we do is mar­velous and never cull any­thing because we never look at our work with a crit­i­cal eye to see where we might learn and improve. Then there are those of us who are so self-critical that unless it looks like a Velasquez, we con­sider it trash. (Who, me?)

Obvi­ously the end goal is always the best qual­ity that you can pro­duce at the level your at – some­thing I need to remind myself quite often.

I think that if you lean towards per­fec­tion­ist ten­den­cies, it might be best to cull a few weeks after the com­ple­tion of a piece. Often when a piece is fin­ished, we are at our most self crit­i­cal – we remem­ber the pain of unreached per­fec­tion and we’d like to take our frus­tra­tion out on some­thing. How­ever, I find that a few weeks of ignor­ing it allows me to mel­low some­what and I can see the piece with a fresher eye. Occa­sion­ally it still needs work, but most times, I find the paint­ing is just fine the way it is.

On the other hand, if you shy away from cri­tiquing your own works (I can hardly blame you – it’s a dis­tinctly unpleas­ant feel­ing), then maybe you might take the oppo­site atti­tude. Wait a few weeks and then see what’s miss­ing from a piece before you send it out into the world. I think you’ll find that most of the time, your work is still just fine, but maybe there are one or two pieces that you can touch up a lit­tle bit, and add those lit­tle fin­ish­ing touches that pull a piece together.

You’ll notice the pro­ce­dure is exactly the same for each type of artist, but I think it’s the atti­tude that you approach the sit­u­a­tion with that’s key. We all get so emo­tion­ally involved in our art that it can be so hard to see with a clear and objec­tive eye – it’s why I sug­gest wait­ing a few weeks. Maybe you only need a few days, who knows? What­ever time period is nec­es­sary to come back to the piece and see it with fresh eyes, as though you’ve never seen it before.

You need to let the paint­ing speak to you, tell you what it needs. Maybe it needs to be framed and sent out into the world. Maybe it needs tweak­ing. And maybe it just needs to be ges­soed over. It hap­pens. And I don’t think there should be any shame in destroy­ing a piece – you learned while cre­at­ing it and it was there to serve a pur­pose. It’s just a step­ping stone to greater works.

But I’ve been known to be full of hot air, so I turn it over to you – how do you cull your good works from the bad? Are you a per­fec­tion­ist or do you strug­gle with cri­tiquing your own work? Leave ‘er in the comments!

About the Author:

Sarah Lacy will be one of our fea­tured artists in the com­ing weeks and she will also be a reg­u­lar con­tributer here on the blog.  She is an amaz­ing young artist who drips wis­dom and pas­sion, for life and art, so much that she clearly is an old soul. She is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the energy, self insight and pas­sion we des­per­ately need in the gen­er­a­tion of artists and cre­atives who will replace us.

Sarah makes “art that reminds you to dream, to breathe, to laugh breath­lessly in the rain”, in doing so she hopes help peo­ple learn “to feel again”.

Sarah’s pas­sion and love for what she does  has been chal­lenged by the her con­stant com­pan­ion of Chronic Fatigue Syn­drome. As a per­son who knows all to well the chal­lenges of liv­ing with a debil­i­tat­ing   chronic dis­ease I was impressed with her courage, open­ness and unwill­ing­ness to sur­ren­der. She has a lot to tell us not only of art but also of life…

You can find Sarah here:

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