Ouch! That hurts!

Art is for me, as for many people, an extremely valuable practice that brings very tangible mental health benefits. It should be noted that sharing of one’s art is never without risk - showing another person a work that we have done always ushers in one particular risk - that of criticism, whether we’ve asked for criticism or not. As someone who paints a lot, I’ve obviously experienced criticism of my work. I’ve also seen and shared in the discomfort of other people who, although realising their work isn’t perfect, aren’t quite ready to be told that.

Is criticism always painful? No, I don’t think it is, necessarily. However, if we are already feeling vulnerable - we WANT our work to be brilliant, but we know that it hasn’t quite achieved our high expectation - we can feel very hurt by someone stating out loud what, deep down, we already know to be the truth. Uncomfortable truth. How should we cope with a negative viewpoint, whether invited or uninvited, of our work?

I’m a firm believer in self-criticism. If you can’t take a step back from something you have created and say “well yes, that bit’s ok, but I don’t like that bit there very much”, I don’t think you can really improve as an artist. There is an oft-quoted story (whether it’s true or not, I do not know) of an art teacher who marked his or her students’ work either based on quality of work, or by quantity. The story goes that the students with the big pile of work became famous and important, whereas the quality-orientated cohort imploded under the pressure, achieving nothing and ending their days in failure and sadness. Ok, I exaggerated the outcomes slightly, but you get the point of the story - that worrying too much about the quality negatively impacts the success and focussing on “play” and just doing art gets good results. That’s the take-home message we’re supposed to get from this story.

Yeah, but.

I don’t quite believe that. I think there’s a balance to be struck here and I think it’s the balance that’s the important bit. When I do a painting that I’m not very happy with, if I do another painting soon afterwards, and focus on improving the bits I don’t like (copying elements of both the high-volume cohort and the “perfectionists” in the story above), I will improve. Rinse and repeat and you might expect to see some kind of tangible benefit in a relatively short space of time. Just mechanically churn out a million pieces of “art” with no regard for what you’re doing, and rather obviously, I don’t believe you’ll make much in the way of improvement. So criticism is very important. I don’t think you can improve without self-criticism and I don’t think you can display your work without expecting external criticism. It’s what you choose to do in response to the criticism that’s the real make or break here.

So what’s my take-home message?

I do art for myself. I don’t do it to please my wife, my family or my friends. For me. Ever since I started painting and drawing on a regular basis, it was with a view to becoming better. And I have. I’m not “there” yet, wherever “there” is, but I’m closer to it than I was when I started. Whatever anyone else thinks of my work, there’s one important factor at play here; that if I keep going, I will probably improve. If I stop, I certainly won’t. And so I will accept the criticism, and be honest with myself. But I won’t get upset.