I would just like to say a big YEEHAW for my new site – if you’re reading this by RSS or by email, you’ll definitely want to click through and check it out. I am super proud of my new baby – blood, sweat, tears, and 5 days straight of coding went into this puppy. I’m so pleased with it. Plus, prints are back up and the new prices are there, so feel free to have a wander ’round.

On to what I’m thinking about this morning – finishing. Shipping, if you’re feeling Seth Godin-ey. I don’t finish. I don’t ship. I moodle on for eons. The thing is, the actual painting part I do for myself – it’s what I love. But the finishing of paintings? I seem to struggle with that part a lot. I drag it out, endlessly.

Part of it is perfectionism – I hold myself to incredibly high standards, but at the same time, those standards aren’t necessarily achievable.(“This had better be at least as good as a Sargent portrait before I let it out the house.”)

But I realized this morning that the other part – often times the larger part – is apathy.  A strong sense of “Why bother? Nobody wants it anyways.”

As much as we artists try to pretend business and money have nothing to do with the precious things that we create, when it seems like nobody actually wants your art, it can be hard to feel like you actually need to finish anything. When you sell 5 original paintings a year, a voice starts to whisper that nobody wants what you make, so what’s the point in finishing? I’ve got probably 7 paintings kicking around that with a few hours work could be finished up and posted on the site. But I don’t finish them. They sit there. Why?

I’ve been candid about how much I struggle to value the things I create - they mean the world to me, but I struggle with the value that they create for other people. It’s so intangible, so nebulous. It’s not “more money and time”, it’s “more beauty, more meaning, more soul”. But just because that’s my intention with my work doesn’t mean it gets through to the other side. And my insecurities, my self doubt, say it doesn’t. (Even if I know this isn’t true – people have told me they love my work. But self doubt doesn’t actually give a damn about the truth. That gets in the way of making me feel like crap.)

So if that voice whispers that my work has no value and no one wants it, then what’s the point in creating more? What’s the point in posting new pieces? Nobody wants them anyways.

That’s the hard part about the whispering. It’s so soft, so insidious, so convincing, that you don’t even notice that it’s there, or that you’ve started to believe it. I only noticed this morning that it’s been happening for nearly 2 years.

So what to do? Do I miraculously overcome my self doubt and leap upon finishing my paintings?

Ehh, probably not. I’m working at overcoming my lack of confidence, but it’s a process. I’ve spent nearly a decade battling intense self doubt, and it’s something I interact with and work on every day, but I’m not going to be making any overnight recoveries. There are too many patterns in there to unravel them all overnight.

What I need is to find another compelling reason to finish my paintings, something stronger than the apathy of “Nobody wants them anyways.”

It has to be personal, dependent solely on me and not some potential outside approval – that fluctuates. If it’s dependent on me, it’ll be constant. However, it should be something I publicly commit to, so that I have to hold myself accountable to people (embarrassment is a very good motivator).

Maybe it could be a challenge, to finish 50 paintings by the end of the year. Maybe it would be to share 3 new paintings a month. Maybe a new painting per week! We could institute a special blog post day, with a new painting every Wednesday or something.

And then the focus would be on the sharing of new art, and not the selling of new art. So even if nobody else wants them, my walls will be sexy.

I’d love to hear from you though – what do you think I could do to challenge myself to finish paintings?
Do you like the idea of a new painting every week? I’m totally open to ideas on this one. (But can we leave ideas on overcoming self doubt for another week? I’d really appreciate that. I find advice gets me all stuck in “shoulds” and what I’m “supposed” to be doing, instead of trusting my own intuition.)