Decade

If I cast my mind back to that studio that I had in 2010, I am sure it appears a lot bigger than it actually was. My memory of how cold it was is probably accurate though. I shared it with my friend, a prolific illustrator who churned out dozens of drawings a day, while I sat hatching and cross-hatching delicate drawings, the characters echoing what a useless object I felt like. I was suffering from the classic post-B.A. slump that most art graduates never make it past. I stared at funding proposals which may as well have been a jumble of binary code and hieroglyphs. I drew little creatures and then shoved the drawings in a folder, not knowing what to do with a piece if not have someone grade it. I had no idea how to navigate the sosiopolitical landscape of the art world, so I went to the studio less and less until I saw it as a drain on my paltry finances and gave it up. 

Maybe it’s my own fault for using Bing as my homepage, but when I searched ‘Why do so many people quit art?’ on the internet, this was the response I got:

Google has since given me the same result (and I hope you feel reassured that I have since changed my default search engine). When I contemplated returning to my practice in 2020, I made the decision to start with the medium I was most afraid of - painting - as I figured I would begin with the thing I was most intimidated by (it is the most legitimate art medium, after all). In hindsight, it was a rather backwards way of going about things, but I have never taken a linear path to anything. My thinking was that I needed to pull off the band-aid on the fear and self-doubt that had shut me down in 2010. 

The root of this fear was a belief that because I had never learned to paint “properly”, I wasn’t allowed to do it. That fear was one of the many vestiges of art college which paralysed me while I was studying and for long after. As I crouched on my bedroom floor during the early months of lockdown, trying to stretch canvases the way I saw the man in the YouTube tutorial do, I listened to Marina Abramovic read her autobiography. The book included her artist’s manifesto. I bristled, not because the content of this was particularly affronting, but of how laden with judgement the word ‘should’ is. It harkened back to the ‘rules’ of art that were drummed into us by our college tutors. I have always walked an irritating tightrpoe of being an ardent lover of rules and a willful breaker of them.

The ‘shoulds’ of art conjured a stifling fear of impending judgement in me. Surely self-doubt is a near inevitable in a field where ‘critique’ can often be so brutal. Critique becomes unhelpful when it comes filled with judgement and devoid of compassion. Judgement shames us, and shame obstructs expression.

You shouldn’t use paint straight from the tube
You shouldn’t mix paint on the canvas
You shouldn’t make work about yourself, it’s too hard to grade
You shouldn’t like Jeff Koons
You should like Egon Schiele
You should research, research, research and then make something that’s not derivative
You should draw everything you are going to make in a notebook first and carefully plan it
You should understand liminal space
You should use the word ‘juxtapose’ with wanton abandon
You shouldn’t care about making money
You should go to openings every week and Put Yourself Out There 
What do you mean you couldn’t afford to go to the Venice Biennale? You really should have gone. It’s research. You should be doing more research. 

I think about how much I loved art before I studied art, because I was yet to learn the rules. I found it so hard to make work that wasn’t self-referential. That seemed to be against the rules.

I also think about all the people I have spoken to over the years who say that they really like making art, but they are not any good at it, so they don’t do it. 

I wonder at what point in school a few of their classmates started drawing cats and cars more realistically and became the people in the class that were ‘good at art’, receiving all the encouragement and praise from that point forward. 

I think about the sneering at ‘Sunday painters’, the snobbery that often goes hand-in-hand with art…

When I returned to my practice, I read book after book on artmaking. Themes of self-doubt, fear and a lack of courage sprang up time and again as the primary impediment to art making. The certainty and singularity with which this was posited jarred with me. That’s not to say that there is no truth to it, there definitely is. Self-doubt is a state rather than an emotion, a thought process that springs from the deep wells of shame and fear that live within us. We are hard-wired to seek out and maintain acceptance and belonging; we don’t pursue rejection. We need courage to do the things which would help us move past this fear, but we also need a sense of acceptance from ourselves and others. If we are in a position wherein rejection from others becomes a probability, then protecting ourselves from that is a prudent and self-preserving option. 

Of course, it is our personal responsibility to navigate whatever obstacles stand between us and the pursuit of our desires. However, some people have more obstacles than others. Some have less support, less power, less opportunity, less resources and less freedom to aid them in this pursuit. And so, the assertion that self-doubt is at the core of people not expressing themselves through creative means or otherwise, is not only an oversimplification, but a harmful assumption that everyone has the basic personal, financial and social currency to do so with the addition of some self-belief. It harkens to pull -yourself-up-by-the bootstraps, neoliberal rhetoric wherein the only thing standing between you and everything you desire is your personal grit, hard work and determination. 

I am going to broaden this out for a moment. The notion that the pursuit of our desires, and our subsequent feelings of wellbeing, are the sole responsibility of the individual to manage is a social norm that prevails and tells people that suffering is an internal process, and therefore must be managed internally. It cuts the individual off from all context, and so when one experiences suffering, the suffering is therefore seen as the failing of the individual and not a completely congruent response to external hardships. Sometimes suffering manifests as self-doubt. Self-doubt never manifests without suffering. Moreover, it often arises from systems that have planted the seeds of that doubt within us. 

In 2010, I had no job was worn down by my endless search for employment during a bleak recession. Funding my practice was proving difficult. Most of my close friends had emigrated. I was at a particularly low ebb and had scant motivation to do anything. No one encouraged me to keep making work, and there were people in my life who actively discouraged it. After leaving my studio practice, I tried to engage in creative things for the next ten years - cooking and crafting, working in films and theatre, dressmaking, crocheting – trying to fill the creative gap in my life, not realising at the time that they all lacked the meaning-making that art gave me. In addition, I doubted my work would be good enough, so pushing past all those obstacles held little appeal. 

In 2020, I had free time for the first time in years. I had money, stability, and the support of people close to me who kept encouraging me. I still had the same self-doubt, but that ebbs and flows. My attitude towards the doubt has changed; I make work in spite of it. But I could not do that without the external scaffolding which enable me to engage in my practice with relatively few obstacles. While one of the enemies of art is an absence of limitations, the enemy of absolutely anything is an abundance of limitations.

The assertion that most people who discontinue an art practice do so because of self-doubt is an oversimplification and a position which distils complex processes down to a singular, individualistic, internal one. Perhaps when examining what stands between human beings and the pursuit of their desires, we need to think a little bit further than the first result in a Microsoft Bing search.