Growing As An Artist |

Growing As An Artist

80% of the emails I receive through this website go as follows:

Q: No matter how hard I try I feel like I will never be a good [writer, musician, painter, cook, burlesque dancer, comedian, tap dancer, juggler, misogynist, cow tipper, cat collector, etc.] I really want to be good but I just feel like I will never get there. Did you go through a crisis of confidence? What should I do?

The photo above represents a theory I have about artists:

Let (X) represent time in years (left to right: 0-10)

Let (Y) represent how awesome you are at your particular art form (bottom to top: “Someone please drown me in a urinal” to “I’m Awesome!)

The orange line represents the rate at which a majority of artists grow into their art form, or the Generalized Artistic Growth Rate.
The black line represents the artist’s perception of his or her art, or the Perceptive Rate of Growth.

So what does this mean to the aspiring artist?

If you think you are an amazing and talented individual, chances are you have not been participating in your artistic community for very long.

I call it the, “Dude, I could totally do that” phenomenon. It occurs in art galleries, restaurants, concert halls, and comedy clubs across the planet every day. Someone watching, listening to, tasting, or experiencing a piece of art leans over to a friend and says, “I could totally do that.”

“I could totally do that” is Day Zero. Now Day 1 is an important day:

Day 1 is the day you realize you don’t know what the fuck the word “aperture” means.
Day 1 is the day you figure out not to wear your nice jeans when you use oil paints.
Day 1 is the day you are holding an acoustic guitar over your head trying to bounce the pick out of the body for the 10th time that day.
Day 1 is the day you are scanning the thesaurus for synonyms for “happy.”
Day 1 is the day you realize most chefs don’t use microwaves.
Day 1 is the day you realize beat matching is fucking impossible.
Day 1 is the day you realize Photoshop takes up an unbelievable amount of space on your hard drive.
Day 1 is the day you gasp in horror when you find out how much the fluid head tripod for your video camera is going to cost.
Day 1 is the day you realize that you are not holding the microphone close enough to your face and it’s no matter because no one is laughing at your AIDS joke anyway.
Day 1 is the day you realize that those male ballet dancer “fags” could dead lift your Honda Civic.
Day 1 is the day you realize “I can totally do that” is an unbelievably naive statement.

Now the horrible irony, the overwhelming, earth shattering, bat shit crazy irony is there is only one statement that can get you to Day 2.

“Dude…I can totally do that.”

So if you think your work is shitty and contrived, and for some reason you still wake up with that nagging voice in your head saying, “I could totally do that,” I would say you are on the right track.