Day three of my life as an artist
Yesterday was a bad day. Arguments with the human being I truly love. Made her cry with my selfishness. Will have to make up for that quickly…
Worked on the series “Doubts and Fears” finishing two paintings. One shows me sleepwalking (I guess), the other on the edge of a precipice of beautiful warm colors just one step away. Remember these paintings are not planned in advance. The stories they tell appear intuitively.
I saw the beautiful painting of a friend of mine I had lost trace of yesterday. Her painting is an abstract scene of masterly nuanced yellows and orange contrasted by a black and white center. Very close to the art of Zao Whu Khi. As I congratulated her I noticed this old question crawling back on me. This stupid automatic thought : “am I good enough?”. Competition is the most dangerous idea for me. My entire childhood was dedicated to “being good enough”. Good enough in school because I thought my parents could only love me for my good results. Good enough in sport, Good enough for relationships. Competition is toxic. At least for me. It has kept me from doing so many things and has accompanied me all through my life.
You can only set free your creativity if you get rid of competitive thinking. Competition can increase and accelerate the obtention of skills but it imprisons automatically your fantasy and your sensitivity. Try to be better than someone else and you lose the joy of creativity. Even if your set goal is to get better yourself you’re going the wrong way. I am definitely certain that the only goal worthy of achieving is to hit the right tuning of your expression. Just like a musician you need harmonies, rhythm, beat and melody if you want to express your feelings accurately. If you don’t, the vibrations you send out to the public will not have any resonance. Competition has nothing to do with that. Personal development is never a racing activity.
You don’t need to clap for this. If you are honestly interested in how my journey into art is doing, come and join me on Patreon or look at my paintings on Behance.
Have a wonderful creative day folks
