Cows and Aliens

For an artist I lead a rather practical life. In high school I got an internship my junior year, I had a part time data entry job during my senior year. I saved money, I got good grades, I planned my life. All of that work in high school lead to a great part time job in college and savings to pay for school with. I actually escaped college with only one semester of debt. It was great. All of my planning got me what I wanted.

I have learned that when I really want something, I can be awesome at achieving those long terms goals. I take a rather logical approach to everything when it comes to goals. All of that planning is great, but for the most part it isn't what actually gets me to the end. I have learned that for me I have to give myself something back in order to find the motivation to get to the end.

I like most people love a little instant gratification. It is kind of a spirit lifter when you are in the middle of a long term goal that seems to stretch out into the unforeseeable future. I can get a little over whelmed when I look at just how much further I have to go before I get to the prize at the bottom of the box. There is just so much that I have to get through before I get there, and I am tired. That road can be horribly discouraging when you are ready to give up.

It has been like this for me when it comes to many of my longer term goals. Like my weight loss. I have been desperately trying to get to my goal weight. Like most of the world I am not satisfied with my progress. I keep to the rules, I check in, and continually try to keep up morale.

Instant gratification is my way to keep that morale up. Every week I make a deal with myself, if I keep my rules and don't put any weight on by the end of the week I get a portion size of Hot Tamales. This for me is a source of instant gratification that I look forward to every week. I still follow the rules that day and aside for that little package of sugary goodness I keep to my plan. It helps me keep my spirits high.

Long term goals can be hard. When I decided I was going to go to college I was 8. It may have been a little earlier than the average person to make this kind of life plan. It was over 10 years before I was even going to get into college let alone the extra 4.5 years it took me to actually graduate. I actually asked my mom to help me open up a bank account that year when I realized my goals and I wanted to start saving then. 

Though all that hard work eventually paid off, it was the little moments of instant gratifications that got me through all of those years and still have the savings needed to pay for school. A movie with friends here, a top there, they all helped me to keep up the morale to keep working towards my goals.

And this is where the Cows and Aliens come in. Last month was hard when it came to completing my goal for this year. I have the goal to finish one thrift store piece and one watercolor piece each month. I had trouble with my last thrift store piece. I lost faith in myself, I got down and lost some of my motivation. Then I picked a difficult subject for my water color right after. I put in lots of work on these two pieces. I have started running out of steam on my goal.

So I decided that what I needed was a little instant gratification to get back into my work again. Since I started making thrift store paintings I have wanted to do an alien and cow painting. I didn't know what it was going to be about but I did know that I wanted a farm, cows and some kind of interaction with the standard gray aliens. So this month I found myself a picture of cows to work on. I am so excited to work on this and it is renewing my excitement for my work.

Though instant gratification can be looked down on by people as being immature, or shallow, for me it is a tool. I make goals, and stay productive if I just use it as a moral builder when I am losing steam. So this month we are all about the instant gratification of doing something I want to do right now, but also letting it be a part of the end goal.

Here are the results of instant gratification 

Good Things Come to Those Who...

The saying goes "Good things come to those who wait". I believe this to be a fallacy. There is more to getting what you want than waiting. Yes, there is some patience required, but that is not the same as waiting. Waiting suggests that all you are doing is sitting there hoping that something will happen soon. It is like sitting by the phone hoping that it will ring. It is like checking your email every five minutes hoping you will get some news. Waiting is like a prison sentence. Hospitals have waiting rooms. Dentist's offices have waiting rooms. These are places where nothing happens, where you do nothing while stuff happens around you. Waiting is an action that keeps you from taking any other action. You are entirely consumed with the idea that something will eventually come to you if you just sit there. 

Waiting doesn't bring you good things. Action does. You aren't going to get a phone call if you are the kind of person who spends all of their time sitting by the phone waiting for it to ring. You have to actually go out there and make friends in order to have someone who will give you a call to begin with. You aren't going to receive an email if you haven't done anything that will get you one. 

I believe more in the idea that "You will miss 100% of the shots you don't take". Waiting requires you to miss a ton of shots, because you are so obsessed with the hope of some wind fall. I have learned this lesson the hard way. I spent months waiting for things to happen, to get sales and to get noticed to get loads of different things I wanted. That just doesn't happen. You have to put yourself out there first, if you are going to get noticed. Winning the lottery is so unlikely that putting your hope in that is misguided. You aren't going to get the good things you want that way. It is like hoping that you will get a phone call from a wrong number and it turns out they are a really nice person and want to be your friend, and out for drinks or something. It just doesn't happen that way. 

You have to do the work needed first. That is where patience come into it. I think that if you are going to use the phrase it should really go like this "Good things come to those with Patience" Patience is different form waiting. It doesn't exclude you from other action. It means that you work while you hope that things will come to you. It means that you check you email while you are sending out other emails, you make calls while hoping you will get one back. Patience is beautiful because it doesn't kill your hope that things will happen for you, but also doesn't paralyze you. 

By never giving into the paralysis of waiting you can get so much more done. You also put your self out there for more opportunities to come your way. This applies to anything you may want in your life from making friends, to job opportunities. If you want something you have to go out there and get it. Don't waste your time waiting for things to happen, you will watch you life go by with little to say for it. Waiting is a trap, don't fall into it. 

Throwing in the towel

I spend a ton of time considering giving up. It is easy to give up. But at the same time it is hard. There are many advantages of just giving in. It is a lot less work to just give up. You also don't have to deal with the criticism of others over your work. There is loads of instant gratification of just letting go.

The down side? I have to deal with myself. I have to face the guilt of abandoning my work. I have to cope with the feelings of failure. I have to be able to sit there knowing that I have completely squandered my abilities, and therefore my life. Any long term benefit I might have gained has also disappeared.

When I get the inner urges to cut out and drop my work, I have to weigh the pros and cons of continuing my work. What usually happens is that I add things up and realize, that even though it is physically harder to keep working it is more mentally demoralizing to give up.

What I have learned over the years, is that even though I tend to lose steam as I work on a project, and want to just give up, because I have grown tired of it; it actually hurts more to give up than to keep going. The thing about physical pain is that after a couple of days it goes away and your are stronger next time. The mental anguish of giving up, and the subsequent failure sticks around longer. It brings you down and holds you back from trying again. And what do you get for all of that depression you put up with? You don't get anything. At least with physical effort you are stronger for it, this is not so with self pity and depression.

I have had to learn this the hard way. I have given up on things so many times, all to the same result. Not only do you have to deal with the negative emotions of quitting, but there is also all of the opportunities of learning and growth that you could have gained if you had just kept going.

If you were to break it down logically like a math equation, giving up just doesn't add up. You start out your life at a base line of 0. When you work on a project you gain confidence, strength, knowledge, and understanding. This adds to your life in a positive way so now you have say +4. This just come for making the effort to start a project. Great you are going somewhere. Now here is where things change. When you give up on something you lose the +4 you got earlier, because you didn't finish gaining those attributes since you didn't finish the work. That puts you back at your base line of 0. Then you get a -2 or -3 for all of the mental anguish you put yourself through. You end up depressed because you gave up. That leaves you below what was your base line existence, all of the bad feelings leave you more empty than when you started out.

If however you were to finish your project you have the +4 for the skills and knowledge you gained working towards your goal. Then you get a +3 or +4 for the positive emotions associated with completing a task. Though you may have expelled a bit more energy maybe a -1 or -2 you still end up with more than if you throw in the towel.

This analogy may not really make sense to you, but when I am having those days where I don't really feel like getting out of bed. It helps me to think about all I can gain just by continuing my work towards my goal.

Too much force

When I was in high school I suffered often from what I called "mental constipation". This was when I was working on a project and I had all kinds of ideas for things to be working on, but what I was working on at the time just didn't seem to flow. I would sit and look at the assignment and try to come up with ideas on how to complete it, but all of them were lame or would never work. I would day dream about all of these other great ideas I had but nothing would come for the task at hand. It was like all of these great ideas were clogged up by the fact that I couldn't use them on my current work.

These last couple of weeks I have been suffering again from this ailment. I have had a thrift store piece that has been sitting on my table forever and I have yet to come up with something to add to it that makes me feel satisfied. I sit there and look at the picture and try to force my brain to think of something. It is kind of like when Winnie the Pooh tries to think of something. (http://coub.com/view/2yrectc) It is square peg round hole moment where things just don't quite fit. At time it feels like the more I try to force something to happen the less I can actually think of. The harder I strain to think of something the more crap the ideas get.

I have made a goal for this year, to finish a thrift piece and a water color every month, but this thrift piece is holding me up. I am actually behind now on my goal, because things just don't seem to want to come together for it. It is horribly aggravating that my imagination seems to have stopped dead when it comes to this piece.

What I usually do when I get to this point is throw it aside and work on something new. I just take issue with that right now, because it was my goal to do this. I don't want to just leave this goal behind. I also don't have any other thrift pieces to work on. So in essence I have to work on this one in order to keep up with my goal. My other issue with leaving it for later is that I have a tendency to put things aside and never come back to them. The "while" I say to myself seems to mean to put it away and forget about it.

So I guess what I am going to need to do is, either be willing to commit to an idea that may not be great now and just put something on paper and hammer things into place the hard way and see how it turns out, or I need to figure out a way to set something aside for a while and put a time limit on how long I can put it there.

I just cannot allow myself to become caught up on things like this. I need to be able to keep working instead of becoming stalled on a single piece. This piece is not stronger or smarter than me. I just have to out think my thinking problem and move on.

When I get done with this pieces it may not be my best piece, but at least I will have figured out how to work my way around this "mental constipation" that I find myself with right now.

Going Back to School

We recently went on a trip to visit family and friends back home for a week. I have been suffering through my art work lately. I don't know if it is the lows from coming out of the holiday season or if it is just that I am growing tired of my routine. Either way I have been feeling a little less that thrilled about working on my paintings and selling my wares and being social.

I wouldn't call this depression, because I still want to get up and do things. I know that if it really were depression it would be more debilitating, that is not what I am going though right now. But none the less I am still feeling like I am in this kind of slumpy mess, where getting up and working on my art has become a chore. Like eating oatmeal for breakfast for a year. You know you should eat, and because you are hungry you want to eat, but you have a hard time motivating yourself to eat because it is oatmeal again.

So like I said I was visiting family and I was hanging out with my closest friend, and we were talking about his weird place I have found myself and how it is that I can get out of it. She suggested taking a couple of community college courses to get back in the more social side of the art world.

I thought about it and for the next couple of weeks thought that that was exactly what I needed. I needed structure, and I needed to get in touch with the greater art community again. I looked at classes, and applied, and analyzed class costs. But for some reason I couldn't commit myself to actually signing up for classes.

Even though I had spent days convincing myself that taking classes again was a good idea something kept telling me that it wasn't. I didn't know why I was so hesitant to start classes again. I mean I have been taking classes for most of my life and I know how to tackle them. I know how to get good grades, I know how to work by a school schedule. There is really no reason for me to feel like I shouldn't be taking these classes.

Then I realized what it was. For me school is a cop out. I know how work that way. I know how to finish assignments and get grades, I know how to work with people in that environment. It is like knowing the system so well that I can without thinking easily jump through all of the hoops to finish a class, but then what? What would I have gained?

I would still be having trouble dealing with my self. I would still have confidence issues. I would have just paid the school for a few weeks of jumping through hoops for grades. It's not like any of that was my work. I did it, but these are assignments the work I would have completed wouldn't been marketable. It wouldn't be gaining anything. I would have come out with the same issues I came into it with.

I have not really learned how to function outside of the school environment. I excel at finishing assignments and doing what other people tell me to do, but that doesn't make you a successful person outside of the school zone. I need to learn how to manage myself. I need to learn how to push myself to be better without having the teachers tell me what to do.

So in the last couple of weeks I have been making assignments for myself. I figure there are two advantages to this school I have created for myself. I get to exercise the discipline I would have had in class that I thrive with, and I know what my weaknesses are. I can adjust my "curriculum" to what I need it to be. I can give myself assignments designed around what I feel needs improvement. As for the social aspect that I have been missing out on I don't need a classroom to get that. The real art scene doesn't happen in the classroom anyway. I have made it one of my assignments to get out to galleries and art functions and circulate with people who are working artists and not just students.

I guess what all of this leads to is yet again I am realizing many of the flaws of our schooling system. I have learned again that I was never completely prepared by school to know how to function outside of its doors. There are life experiences that you have to gain through experience rather than through school. If we are ever going to learn how to function outside of school we are going to eventually have to leave it, and learn about ourself enough to flourish on our own. We cannot  have the training wheels on forever.

The ADD Clinic

I used to live in a area where there was an ADD clinic we used to drive passed on occasion. The first time I ever noticed it was when I was in the middle of a conversation, instantly mid sentence I knew that I just had to point out this wonderful moment. Stopping the conversation with a sudden exclamation of "ADD Clinic?" made for a nice moment of beautiful comedic effect. We spent the next few minutes busting up over just how perfect the situation had been.

The thing is though that I do suffer from a serious case of self diagnosed ADD. I have a hard time spending serious amounts of time working on anything. If cleaning takes more that ten minutes I get bored. If a painting takes more than I week it usually gets tossed aside. It is not really a commitment issue, I love getting started on a project and I envision myself doing all of the work and see what needs to be done, but most of the time I get half way there and get distracted, and finishing the piece becomes a chore. I don't really want to keep working on it I want to move onto the other new shiny idea, because it is way more interesting that what I am currently working on. This doesn't mean that I want to completely get rid of this disorder. I love it, that is part of why I never really went to anyone to get help with it. Having this propensity to jump from idea to idea is part of my creative process, and to kill it would kill my creative half, but I cannot let it have too much power either.

This year I have been challenging myself to finish things. Well, not just to finish things. I already do that, but to finish them well, with the same amount of commitment and execution that I had dedicated to the beginning. I don't want to fizzle out. I want to be able to get done with a piece and have the result be a good as the original idea was.

I have been using different techniques of trying to get more out of my ideas. I have been slowing down paying attention to details. I have been working on my skills. I have been standing back for a day and getting perspective. I have been trying to distance myself from the work, so that maybe I can come back at it with more interest because I haven't had my head stuck in it for days straight.

Though I am more proud of the work that I have been doing since implementing this thinking to my art, it is like peeling my skin off. I am not going to lie, it is flat out torture to keep my mind on one piece for so long. I know that it is good for me to be pushing myself to put more work into something, but some days I look at the half finished piece and think, wouldn't it just be better if I moved on?

Reining in my natural desire to jump from project to project has been hard. I know that some people can spend years on a piece, it can consume them and take them for a journey. I have never found a piece of art that had made me feel that way. Sometimes I feel that I am doing things wrong because I don't have that kind of long lasting passion that others have. I know that my art could be so much better if I would be willing to put more effort into it. The thing is that, I don't need to be like other artists, I just need to be better than I am now.

I know that I am not other people and I do art differently than they do and that I am not making their art. I just need to be myself and make my art, but I also need to be better than just me. I need to push myself further so that I can grow while making something new,. Not letting my ADD run my life is part of that journey for me.

I have confidence

After last week were I spent my time admitting that I pretty much suck at selling my self and my work, I spent some time thinking about other reasons why I am having trouble selling it. I suffer at times from crippling self doubt. It is odd really. I usually start off a project with all of the confidence in the world. New projects make me feel like I can do anything. I work on it with vigor, thinking to myself that I have just come up with the most brilliant idea since cheese and the no one will be able to resist it. I generally have an over abundance of confidence when I start out on a new venture in life. Sadly though as time progresses on the project I tend to become filled with doubt, and become more and more self conscious of my work.

I begin to think to myself that maybe I was a little over enthusiastic when I started. Maybe I didn't think things through and the concept of my work is really only cool and interesting to myself. Maybe I didn't execute it very well and people won't like the finished product and that I was promising more than I had delivered. The more time I spend on a project the more of these doubts find their way into my mind.

So as I am sitting here coming close to a year of having my Etsy shop, where I am still producing the same types of paintings that I was a year ago, I am beginning to doubt wether all of this was really a good idea in the first place. Every day I have to shake off these insecurities and think to myself that the one year of work I have put in has seen very little of this world and cannot, as yet, be deemed a failure. I cannot rightfully call this a failure yet, because it hasn't been given a chance to flourish. I have read about other shops and know that it takes time for things to get moving, and I just have to give it a chance.

I cannot assume success or failure of anything that I do until I have given it the opportunity it deserves. I cannot spend time being down on myself when I still have so much more that I can do in order to help this work that I have started. I have to see this through to the end to determine if it was good work to begin with. I cannot let self doubt kill my work, and as hard as it may seem, I need to push through the hesitation and worry and put myself out there even if I have doubts.

Everyone has doubts, nothing in  life is 100% guaranteed. What I do know is that if I never work past this mental block and try harder to get my work noticed, then I will never know if it was a success at all.