Art is hard.
That’s what I told a friend today, and I think it’s true. All the people I know who I think of as artistic, creative people admit that sometimes, they feel like posers. They sometimes feel like they aren’t doing anything “real” (whatever that means; for everyone it’s something slightly different) with their creative impulses.
Sometimes creative people get stuck. They hit dry spells. They try to ignore the fact that something inside them wants to be made–a poem, a story, a painting, a photograph, a quilt, a song–to escape from their mind and emerge as a created thing. But they should make them anyway.
It is difficult to make things, to be vulnerable and express how you think and feel about the world through some medium or other. Art says “here’s how I see the world, or part of the world, or how I want to see the world, or how I’m afraid I see the world.”
My boss tells me often, “anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” meaning you have to start somewhere. And he reminds me that even though I strive for perfect, I usually have to settle for “good enough.” And that’s ok. If I don’t start with something, I won’t have started at all.
There is the perfect piece of art, and then there’s the art that actually gets created. These aren’t identical, and looking for the “perfect” idea (much less perfect execution), is a dead-end.
Sometimes I need to be reminded of that. It’s ok to not be perfect, and it’s ok to be stuck. I just can’t stay there. So here’s to the “good enough.”
