The Truth About The Struggling Artist
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We’ve always seen the artist as “the struggling artist”.
An Artist’s life will always be met with tons of struggles, such as struggles to earn money or to find a job etc…
That’s what the Artist’s life has always been seen as and that’s why most parents don’t really want their children to follow that path, because they don’t want their children to struggle.
But what if I told you that The Struggling Artist means something else?
In my opinion, a struggling artist is not someone who’s struggling to make ends meet. (Although that can happen, unfortunately…)
A struggling artist is actually someone who is frustrated. But he/she is not frustrated for the reasons that you might think.
You see, every creative person needs to be frustrated.
You might be thinking that it’s a weird idea but we actually need frustration to be creative.
The truth is that if you don’t feel a little bit frustrated then that means that you’re feeling comfortable and if you’re comfortable then that means that you are not going to be evolving and you’re just going to be stagnant.
Whereas if you are frustrated and you seek frustration, that’s where your creativity can work and find solutions which will help you evolve.
But when I say frustrated, I don’t mean it in a bad way and I don’t mean that you’ll be yelling and pulling your hair out. (Although, maybe you might…)
But what I really mean is that you have to come across things that you struggle to do, things that you struggle to figure out in order to find a way to make things work.
For instance, I draw. And there are a lot of things that I have no idea how to draw.
First, I was struggling with shadows and highlights. It’s hard and scary to color people’s faces because I’m scared that if I put too much shadows it’ll be too dark and if I don’t do enough it’ll be barely visible. But the more I’m doing it, the more I understand how much pressure I should put for the shadows and highlights to be just right.
But I don’t stay comfortable in what I know how to do!
That is why I love my little art project because I challenge myself to do things that I don’t really know how to do and the more I do it the better I get. And when I feel comfortable with a certain aspect of the drawing, there will always be something else that gives me a hard time and once again I’ll struggle to do it right but I’ll do it anyway.
The truth is that there is always going to be struggles. And if there’s no struggle, you need to find one.
You need to step out of your comfort zone because although it’s nice and cozy, nothing really happens in the comfort zone.
I’m not asking you to do crazy things but you always need to find something that you kind of struggle to do and you need to learn how to do it.
It’s the same principle as the saying “NEVER STOP LEARNING”.
There are always things that you can learn and most of the time the things that you’ll have to learn are things that you’ll struggle with.
So along with the saying “NEVER STOP LEARNING” we should also say “NEVER STOP STRUGGLING”.
It’s silly to say that you have to seek struggle when that’s what we’re all trying to avoid.
But it’s in struggles that there’s growth and as odd as it sounds it’s in struggle that we can find happiness.
If we didn’t struggle, we wouldn’t know how hard certain things are to get or learn and we wouldn’t be grateful to have them in the end.
If everything was easy and just given to us when we want them then we wouldn’t know how much we really wanted them nor would we know their real value.
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